eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she
found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts
went back to the memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of
bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager,
restless girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally
analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly
despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing,
flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town. How
she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and
prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins! And,
for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard
for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little
woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine
admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax
well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but
she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally
gifted as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply
country merchants, her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in
furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an
Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of
Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in
Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger,
in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason
why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no