pleasure. She hoped her aged relative was right; certainly one
would suppose Granny to be right in anything she said.

The time would have swiftly come when the child's changing heart
would have found no room for this association, but before Rachael
was twelve Granny was gone, the little house, with its few poor
treasures shut inside it, was closed and empty. And only a year or
two later a far more important change came into the girl's life.
She had always disliked Los Lobos, had schemed and brooded and
fretted incessantly through her childhood. It was with astonished
delight that she heard that her parents, who had never, in a
financial sense, drawn a free breath since their marriage, who had
worried and contrived, who had tried indifference and bravado and
strictest economy by turns, had sold their ranch for almost two
thousand dollars more than its accumulated mortgages, and were
going to England.

It was a glorious adventure for Rachael, even though she was too
shrewd not to suspect the extreme hazard of the move. She talked
in Los Lobos of her father's "people," hinted that "the family,
you know, thinks we'd better be there," but she knew in her heart
that a few months might find them all beggars.

Her father bought her a loose, big, soft blue coat in San
Francisco, and a dashing little soft hat for the steamer. Rachael
never forgot these garments throughout her entire life. It
mattered not how countrified the gown under the coat, how plain
the shoes on her slender feet. Their beauty, their becomingness,
their comfort, actually colored her days. For twenty dollars she
was transformed; she knew herself to be pretty and picturesque.