ing at five in the
morning and working until breakfast. He sold his finest carriage horses
to Mr. Geary; and when one of the two remaining was temporarily
disabled, he rode to and from the station in the spring wagon. The
monthly allowance of his wife and daughter was suspended for the summer.

Mrs. Yorba, tall, garbed in black, stalked about the house with the
expression of an outraged empress; Magdalena, being the cause of the
outrage, was rarely addressed. She ostentatiously made over several of
her old frocks and coldly requested her daughter to make her own bed.
She kept all the windows in the house, with the exception of one in each
room, closed and shuttered, as she was deprived of both service and
water. The house seemed perpetually expectant of funeral guests, its
silence only broken by Mrs. Yorba's heavy sighs.

Magdalena had certainly succeeded in making three people miserable; she
could only hope that she had been more fortunate with the other two. She
spent most of her time out of doors, riding or walking until her
strength was exhausted. She was profoundly grateful that she was to take
little part in the socialities of the summer. To dance and picnic and
tennis and ride to the hills, exactly as she had done when quite another
person! She infinitely preferred the disapproval of her parents and the
freedom they gave her.

XVII

Trennahan had written to Magdalena from the Islands, acknowledging the
letter she had written him after her interview with her father, and
accepting his dismissal. He returned to San Francisco the last of May.
Almost immediately she received a letter from Helena announcing her
engagement to him.

Helena, while in Southern California, had written to Magdalena with her
accustomed regularity. The letters were bitter with self-reproach
alternated with the very joy of being alive in that opulent southern
land. When she wrote of the engagement she assured the dearest friend
she had on earth that if things had turned out differently she should
have gone away and got over it somehow, but as Magdalena's decision was
irrevocable she intended to be the happiest girl in the world; it
wouldn't do anybody a bit of good if she wasn't. Magdalena felt no
bitterness toward her. She had lost Trennahan; the woman mattered
nothing. She would rather it were Helena than another; for who else
could make him so happy? But she knew that she should see less of Helena
in the future, and she hardly