out on the bed before us.

Such a dazzling idea gave me an entirely new set of fancies, and was a pleasant book companion and bedfellow to take back to the convent. Hallie, who was a year older and half a head taller than I, had already begun to lengthen her dresses, and do up her hair, and I found it humiliating to be so small that at sixteen I had still to wear mine down my back in long curls, and my skirts above my ankles. The only thing that comforted me was that whenever father came to see me he always said:

"Child, how tall you are! You're almost a woman!" and though he was the one person who seemed to think so it was quite sufficient for me. When my graduation day came I was much excited to think how absolutely grown-up I would appear to him in my first long frock, but when I came to him after the exercises were over, he looked at me as if he were sad, and said, "Child, how little you are!"

That was a dreadful disappointment to me, but when I reminded him how he had always told me I was tall, he laughed, and said: "You were tall for a school-girl, but you're very little to be the mistress of a house."

That puzzled me; but on the way home, driving up through the valley, he told me more about what he meant. He said, "Now that you have stopped being a child you are going to be a very gay young lady; going to have fine gowns, and dance about like a butterfly; and you're going to keep on being my little girl; but at the same time I am afraid you will have to be a little lady of the house, too, and take care of me, and Abby—now that Abby's rheumatism is so bad—and go to call on the ladies who were your mother's friends, and are going to be yours. Do you think you are tall enough to do all that?"

I was so surprised and so happy that I hugged him right there in the buggy, and said: "Do you really mean it?"

Father laughed, just as he does to cover up being rather serious, and said: "You are your mother's daughter, for she was a little fair woman, but there was never anything too big for her to manage."

I was happier than ever to hear him say that—he so seldom spoke of mother—and the idea of a whole house to manage, and of sitting at the foot of the table, and calling on grown-up married women seemed to me as merry and exciting as going to parties, and having beaus.

I had not been in the city for a year, spending my last vacations at the ranch at Menlo Park; and though I knew from what Hallie had told me, that the city was very different, yet when I got out of the buggy in front of the house the look of the street startled me. For a moment even the house seemed strange. But that was only because the other houses were all about it. As far as one looked up the hill there was nothing but thick houses, and queer little shops were crowding up the block so close that we had the appearance of being almost down-town. Even inside the house looked different, but quite beautifully different, done over with lovely, fresh papers, and Japanese mattings; but what touched and pleased me most of all was to find the picture of mother, which had used to hang over father's dressing-table, now in my room, above my bed. "You need it now more than I do," he said, and though I couldn't see just why I needed it, I loved to look at it. The amusing part of it was that mother in the picture was holding me—a little me—a baby two years old. Myself would never look out at me. But mother looked always, with the same half-brave, half-timid glance, when, sitting on the bed, I made her my confidences.

With all my new responsibilities, and my new clothes I felt as if I had somehow been "done over" too. Yet it was surprising how quickly I became used to the patter of my long petticoats around my feet as I walked, the weight of all my hair upon my head, and my stately pouring of the tea at the foot of the dinner-table. Father's friends were always coming in and out, and staying to luncheon or dinner, and with their high silk hats, their elegant bows to me, and their laughing at things I said which were not in the least funny, at first they confused me not a little. But I grew accustomed to them, too; I grew even to like them, especially Mr. Dingley, father's greatest friend, who was the district attorney. He was a big, dark man, with a broad face, and a frown that never came out of his forehead. He looked frightfully severe, but I soon found out he was really quite easy-going, much more so than father, and often I could get around Mr. Dingley when father, for all his being pleasant, wouldn't have given an inch. But father said he had to be very stern, or other people would spoil me. By that he meant not so much Mr. Dingley, who was the same to everybody, as Señora Mendez, who had been mother's greatest friend. She had been a New England girl, who, in the early days of California, had married a Spanish gentleman. She was lovely to me. It was at her house that I went to my first ball. Except the Fergusons', hers was the only house in the city with rooms large enough to dance in, and that ball is still the most dazzling I can remember. I wore a rose-colored tulle skirt with a peasant waist of rose-colored satin, and father, for a great surprise, had given me a pair of pink silk stockings. No other girl in town had such a beautiful thing, and in the dressing-room they would not let me go down until I had shown them. The lighted dancing-rooms, and all the strange people, and my tall partners made me nearly die of shyness, but I danced two large holes in the toes of my lovely stockings, and afterward father teased me, and said he found he had suddenly become very popular with the young men. He had never been so called upon in his life.

But most of our parties were not such elegant affairs, though sometimes they were even more fun, like the Fergusons' calico ball, where I wore my grandmother's gingham, and prunella shoes; or the party the Sumner Light Guards gave, which was the prettiest of all on account of the young men's uniforms, and the way we sat around the little refreshment tables between dances with our mothers and our partners, the band playing all the time, and every one so gay.

I sometimes went to as many as four parties a week, so that in the morning it was all I could do to be up in time to see breakfast on the table. I found out that being a housekeeper meant more than long petticoats, and pouring tea. It meant being all over the house before ten in the morning, for, as Abby said, a house has a lot of strings to it, and unless you keep them all tied up tight something's going to sag. But I enjoyed my authority of the house, and my liberty abroad seemed like license to me. I felt launched on a wide sea of life.

The city itself was changed to my new horizon. It was larger, more complicated, with more masts in the harbor, new streets and horse-car lines, and every one moved about in it like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle. The friends who had lived close about us had all moved westward or southward with the trend of the city, and between Telegraph and Chestnut Street Hills there were some very, fine houses. I was often running over there to see Hallie or Estrella, and my shortest way lay past the convent that stood a little apart in the middle of the settlement. Next to it, but facing on another street, was a house which had been built at the same time as the convent. The convent wall came up at its back. On the other three sides was a high fence. Over the fence only the upper story could be seen, and it had a look so still and closed up, that it brought back to me that feeling of mystery the city used to give me as a child. But I never noticed or wondered about it particularly until one day when I saw an open carriage waiting in front of the steps.

While I was looking a woman came out of the gate, and got into the carriage. She was Spanish, I saw at a glance, and big, and all in sweeping black, but instead of being dark she was tawny, with a wonderful glow of copper-colored hair through her black lace veil, and in all my life I had never seen a creature move so