soul in town! And the house like a prison! What in Heaven's
name ails your father? He's not crazy. He's reading his ledgers, and
what he says is to the point, goodness knows! But I shall follow Hiram
if this keeps up. You're a real comfort to me, 'Lena. I don't know what
I should do without you."

Magdalena said what she could to console her mother. The two had drawn
together during these trying months. She was bitterly disappointed that
she could not go to Menlo Park. She was tired of its efforts to amuse
itself, but she could live in its woods, its soft gracious air, find
companionship in the distant redwoods swimming in their dark-blue mists.

The girls all invited her to visit them, but she would not leave her
mother, even could her father's consent be obtained. Mrs. Yorba was
genuinely unhappy. Without mental resources, and deprived of even an
occasional hour with her friends, she was further harassed by the fear
that her husband would die and leave her with a pittance: he certainly
appeared to hate the sight of his family. It consoled her somewhat to
reflect that wills were easily broken in California. Why had her brother
left her nothing? With a full purse she could at least have the
distractions of philanthropy. She took to novel-reading with a voracious
appetite, and her taste grew so exacting that she would have nothing
that was not magnificently sensational. She thought on Boston with a
shudder, but concluded that it was enough to have been intellectual when
young.

Magdalena plodded on with her work. She described the customs and
manners of the old times with much accuracy, and felt that her beloved
creations were rather more than puppets; and it was as much for their
sake as for her own that she wanted these little histories to be
triumphs of art, that they might arrest the attention of the world.
Alvarado and Castro were great heroes to her: it was unjust and cruel
that the big world outside of California should know nothing of them; to
the present Californian, for that matter, they were not even names. And
forty years before the Californias had bent to their nod! They had lived
with the state of princes, and the wisdom with which the one had ruled
and the other had managed his armies would have given them lasting fame
had not their country then been as remote from Earth's greater
civilisations as had it been on Jupiter. If she could only immortalise
them! That would be a sufficient reason for living, co