back from a desk in Los Angeles, where, gossip said, he
was drinking himself to death, and gave him over his daughter to keep.
From that time on, during a succession of removes which took him from
Vancouver on the north to Los Angeles on the south, Billy Gray had
establishment after establishment, housekeeper after housekeeper for
this daughter. Her face and ways, the dim shadowing of her mother's,
were the only hold on reality which he kept.

She grew up a rather grave little thing, hardly pretty at all until
she turned fifteen, when she showed signs that the beauty of her aunt,
if not the wit of her mother, might live again in her. Of wit, it
seemed, she had little; neither did she show any great talents in her
irregular schooling. Her longest term at any one school was three
years with the Franciscan Sisters in Santa Barbara. They, Spanish
gentlewomen mainly, are the arbiters and conservators of old fashioned
manners on the West Coast. Of them it is said, as it is said of
certain sisterhoods in France, that one may know their graduates by
the way they keep their combs and brushes. In two years Eleanor
absorbed something of their grave gentility from these Spanish women.
Little else she got from that education, seeing that she was a
Protestant and studied neither catechism nor church doctrine. She did,
indeed, totter once on the brink of Rome--even dared speak to her
father about it. He accepted the situation so carelessly and gave his
assent so easily that she was a little hurt. But the next day, he
quizzed her about the church and its doctrines. Like a good lawyer, he
slipped in the crucial question of his cross-examination between two
blind ones.

"All who die outside of the church go to Hell, don't they?" he asked.

"Sister Sulpicia says so."

"Then your grandmother" (Mrs. Sturtevant had just died) "is in Hell?"

He pursued the line no further; he never needed to; and after a time
the storm of doctrine died down in her. That phase of life left
another effect on her beside her manners--a mark common enough among
Protestant women reared in the shadow of the Catholic Church. Outside
its pale by belief, she clung to a few of its sacramentals for pet
superstitions, and to a few of its observances for her consolation in
trouble and her expression in happiness.

She was sixteen, and about to graduate from a Seminary in Oakland,
when her call came to her. In one moment, the secret of her father's
long absence beca