r to keep pace with Helena.
She sat up late into the night poring over lessons that her brilliant
friend danced through while dressing in the morning. Her memory was bad,
and she never mastered spelling; even after her schooldays were over,
she always carried a little dictionary in her pocket. She laboured for
years at the piano, not only under her father's orders, but because she
passionately loved music, but she had neither ear nor facility, and to
her importunities for both the Virgin gave no heed.

And the bitterness of it all lay in the fact that she was not stupid;
she was fully aware that her intellect was something more than
commonplace; but the machinery was heavy, and, so far as she could see,
there was not a drop of cleverness with which to oil the wheels. She had
read extensively even before she was sixteen,--letters, essays,
biographies, histories, and a number of novels by classic authors; and
although she was obliged to read each book three times in order to write
it on her memory, she slowly assimilated it and developed her brain
cells. Up to this age she was seldom actively unhappy, for she had the
hopes of youth and religion, her aunt, Helena, and, above all, her sweet
inner life, which was an almost constant dwelling upon the poetical
past, linked to a future of exalted ideals: not only should she be more
beautiful than Helena or Tiny Montgomery or Ila Brannan, but she should
hold rooms spell-bound with her eloquence, or the music in her
finger-tips; and when in solitude her soul would rise to such heights as
her fettered mind hinted at vaguely but insistently. Wild imaginings for
a plain tongue-tied little hybrid, but what man's inner life is like
unto the husk to whose making he gave no hand?

IV

Helena remained an hour longer, then ran home to don a white frock and
Roman sash. Her father, with all his vagaries, seldom failed to dine at
home; and he expected to find his little daughter, smartly dressed,
presiding at his table. His sister, Mrs. Cartright, who had managed his
house since his wife's death, made no attempt to manage Helena, and
never thought of taking the head of the table.

Magdalena stood for some time looking out over the darkening bay, at the
white mist riding in to hang before the mountains beyond. She had seen
California wet under blinding rain-storms, but never ugly. Even the fogs
were beautiful, the great waves of sand whirling through the streets of
San Francisco p