"I can pass the next five years. I do not pretend to regret them, though, perhaps, you would say I simply wasted time and opportunity. I enjoyed them, and it seems to me I was the person most concerned in the matter. I had a fresh, full capacity then for enjoyment of every kind. I loved nature and I loved art. I warmed both hands at the glowing fire of life. Time may do his worst. I have been happy, and I can throw those five careless, jovial years, in his face to my last hour.
"But one must awake out of every pleasant dream, and one day I got a letter urging my immediate return home. My father had got himself involved in a lawsuit, and was failing rapidly in health. My younger brother was away with a ranger company, and the affairs of the ranch needed authoritative overlooking. I was never so fond of art as to be indifferent to our family prosperity, and I lost no time in hurrying West.
"Still, when I arrived at home, there was no one to welcome me! The noble, gracious Garcia slept with his ancestors in the old Alamo Church; somewhere on the llano my brother was ranging, still with his wild, company; and the house, in spite of the family servants and Mexican peons, was sufficiently lonely. Yet I was astonished, to find how easily I went back to my old life, and spent whole days in the saddle investigating the affairs of the Garcia ranch.
"I had been riding one day for ten hours, and was so fatigued that I determined to spend the night with one of my herdsmen. He had a little shelter under some fine pecan trees on the Guadalupe, and after a cup of coffee and a meal of dried beef, I sauntered with my cigar down the river bank. Then the cool, dusky shadows of the wood tempted me. I entered it. It was an enchanted wood, for there stood Jessy Lorimer, just as I had painted her.
"I did not move nor speak. I watched her, spell-bound. I had not even the power, when she had mounted her pony and was coming toward me, to assume another attitude. She saw that I had been watching her, and a look, half reproachful and half angry, came for a moment into her face. But she inclined her head to me as she passed, and then went off at a rapid gallop before I could collect my senses.
"Some people, Jack, walk into love with their eyes open, calculating every step. I tumbled in over head, lost my feet, lost my senses, narrowed in one moment the whole world down to one bewitching woman. I did not know her, of course; but I soon should. I was well aware she could not live very far away, and that my herd must be able to give me some information. I was so deeply in love that this poor ignorant fellow, knowing something about this girl, seemed to me to be a person to be respected, and even envied.