Mrs. Mulrady would have preferred that Mamie should remain at
Sacramento until she could join her, preparatory to a trip to "the
States" and Europe, she yielded to her daughter's desire to astonish
Rough-and-Ready, before she left, with her new wardrobe, and unfold in
the parent nest the delicate and painted wings with which she was to
fly from them forever. "I don't want them to remember me afterwards in
those spotted prints, ma, and like as not say I never had a decent
frock until I went away." There was something so like the daughter of
her mother in this delicate foresight that the touched and gratified
parent kissed her, and assented. The result was gratifying beyond her
expectation. In that few weeks' sojourn at Sacramento, the young girl
seemed to have adapted and assimilated herself to the latest modes of
fashion with even more than the usual American girl's pliancy and
taste. Equal to all emergencies of style and material, she seemed to
supply, from some hitherto unknown quality she possessed, the grace and
manner peculiar to each. Untrammeled by tradition, education, or
precedent, she had the Western girl's confidence in all things being
possible, which made them so often probable. Mr. Mulrady looked at his
daughter with mingled sentiments of pride and awe. Was it possible that
this delicate creature, so superior to him that he seemed like a
degenerate scion of her remoter race, was his own flesh and blood? Was
she the daughter of her mother, who even in her remembered youth was
never equipped like this? If the thought brought no pleasure to his
simple, loving nature, it at least spared him the pain of what might
have seemed ingratitude in one more akin to himself. "The fact is, we
ain't quite up to her style," was his explanation and apology. A vague
belief that in another and a better world than this he might
approximate and understand this perfection somewhat soothed and
sustained him.

It was quite consistent, therefore, that the embroidered cambric dress
which Mamie Mulrady wore one summer afternoon on the hillside at Los
Gatos, while to the critical feminine eye at once artistic and
expensive, should not seem incongruous to her surroundings or to
herself in the eyes of a general audience. It certainly did not seem
so to one pair of frank, humorous ones that glanced at her from time to
time, as their owner, a young fellow of five-and-twenty, walked at her
side. He was the new editor of the "Ro