grief was
deep and lasting; and perhaps he knew.

XXVIII

Caro married her Englishman, and on a thriving grape-farm entertained
other Englishmen. Rose went East and triumphantly captured a Baltimorean
of distinguished lineage and depleted exchequer. Tiny went to Europe
again. Magdalena was practically alone. Her father still lived in his
two rooms downstairs and never spoke to anyone but Ah Kee. Once he
forgot to close his study door, and Magdalena, who happened to be
passing, paused and looked at him. His face had shrunken and was crossed
with a thousand fine and eccentric lines; like the palm of a man singled
out for a career of trouble. He had let his hair and beard grow, and he
looked uncouth and dirty.

Mrs. Yorba still read novels. She no longer paid calls, for her
allowance, now reduced to fifty dollars a year, was quite inadequate to
meet the requirements of a dignified member of society. She received her
few intimate and faithful friends in her bedroom; the first floor was
never dusted nor aired. The house smelt musty and deserted; the lower
rooms were as cold and damp as underground caverns; the spiders spun
unheeded; when the front door was opened, the festoons in the hall swung
like hammocks. Even the gloom of the house seemed to accentuate with the
years. Magdalena wondered if the inside of the old Polk house looked any
more haunted than this; and even the Belmont house was acquiring an
expression of pathos, peculiar to desertion in old age. Magdalena
fancied that the three houses must be pointed out to visitors as the
sarcophagi of the futile ambitions of three Californian millionaires.

In her own rooms she toiled on, absorbed in her work, loving it with the
beggared passion of her nature, experiencing two or three moments of
creative ecstasy and many hours of dull discouragement. She wrote her
stories and rewrote them; then again, and again. Her critical faculty
took long strides ahead of her creative power, and she rarely ceased to
be uneasy at the disparity between her work and her ideals. But
Trennahan had said that it would be ten years before she could attain
excellence, and she was willing to serve a harder apprenticeship than
this. Had it not been for her work and the books of those who had
climbed the heights and slept beneath the stars, she might have become
morbid and melancholy in her unnatural surroundings. But although the
monotony of her life was never broken by a day in the cou