icturesque. California was associated in her mind,
however, with perpetual blue skies and floods of yellow light. She had
wondered occasionally if all people were not happy in such a
country,--where the sun shone for eight months in the year, where
flowers grew more thickly than weeds, and fruit was abundant and
luscious. She had read of the portion to which man was born, and had
decided that if Thackeray and Dickens had lived in California they would
have been more cheerful; but to-day, assailed by a presentiment general
rather than specific, she accepted, for the first time, life in
something like its true proportions.

"There are no more caballeros," she thought, putting into form such
sense of the change as she could grasp. "And Helena is going away, for
years; and papa will not let me go, I know, although I mean to ask him;
and aunt is way down in Santa Barbara, and writes that she may not
return for months. And I don't know my music lesson for to-morrow, and
papa will be so angry, because he pays five dollars a lesson; and Mrs.
Price is so cross." She paused and shivered as the white fog crept up to
the verandah. It was very quiet. She could hear the ocean roaring
through the Golden Gate. Again the presentiment assailed her. "None of
those things was it," she thought in terror. "Uncle Jack Belmont says,
according to Balzac, our presentiments always mean something." She
noticed anew how beautiful the night was: the white wreaths floating on
the water, the dark blue sky that was bursting into stars, the
mysterious outline of the hills, the ravishing perfumes rising from the
garden below. "It is like a poem," she thought. "Why does no one write
about it? Oh!" with a hard gasp, "if I could--if I could only write!" A
meteor shot down the heavens. For the moment it seemed that the fallen
star flashed through her brow and lodged, effulgent, in her brain.
"I--I--think I could," she thought. "I--I--am sure that I could." And
so, the cruel desires of art, and the tree of her crucifix were born.

She went inside hastily, afraid of her thoughts. She changed her frock
for a white one, smoothed her sleek hair, and walked downstairs. She
never ran, like Helena--unless, to be sure, Helena dragged her; she had
all the dignity of her father's race, all its iron sense of convention.

She went into the big parlours to await her parents' return; they had
been spending a day or two at their country house in Menlo Park, and
would retu