spark from the great creative force
commanding the Universe,--she felt that she should have no hesitation in
begging for further favours; a certain sense of kinship, of being in
higher favour than the great congested mass, would have given her
assurance and faith. She sighed for a new religion, for that prophet who
must one day arise and rid the world of the abomination of dogma and
sect, giving to the groping millions a simple belief, in which the
fussiness, sentimentality, and cruelty of present religions would have
no place.

She sat there until the dawn came, grey and appalling at first, then
touching the bay and the dark heights with delicate colour, as the sun
struggled out of the embrace of the ocean. She was obliged to walk home,
as she had no money, and the long toilsome tramp in the wake of the
eventful night gave her appetite and many hours of rest. When she awoke
she felt that, whatever came, the most formidable crisis of her life had
been safely passed.

XXXI

In the autumn she found an occupation which gave her a temporary place
in the scheme of things. Mrs. Yorba fell ill. The sudden and complete
change from a personage to a nobody, the long confinement,--she rarely
put her foot outside the house lest her shabby clothes be remarked
upon,--and a four years' course of sensational novels induced a nervous
distemper. Magdalena, hearing the sound of pacing footsteps in the hall
one night, arose and opened her door. Mrs. Yorba, arrayed in a red
flannel nightgown and a frilled nightcap, was walking rapidly up and
down, talking to herself. Magdalena persuaded her to go to bed, and the
next morning sent for the doctor. He prescribed an immediate change of
scene,--travel, if possible; if not, the country. Magdalena undertook to
carry the message to her father.

Knowing that a knock would evoke no response, she opened the door of the
study and went in. Don Roberto, dirty, unshaven, looked like a wild man
in a mountain cave; but his eyes were steady enough. His table and the
floor about his chair were piled high with ledgers. On everything else
the dust was inches thick, and the spiders had spun a shimmering web
across one side of the room. It hung from the gas-rod like a piece of
fairy tapestry, woven with red and gold here and there, where the sun's
rays, scattering through the slats of the inside blinds, caressed it. On
the mantel-piece, supported on its broken staff, was the big American
flag which h