ling now growing up around the pine homestead of
the past.

Lola liked adobe houses; and fortunately Enrique Diaz, the blacksmith,
had a fine lot of adobes which he had made before frost, and put under
cover against a possible extension of his shop, "to-morrow or some time
after a while." These Jane bought, and deftly the chocolate walls arose
in her _vega_, crowned finally with a crimson roof, which could be seen
two miles off at Lynn. There was a porch, too, with snow-white pillars,
and an open fireplace, all tiled with adobe, in which might blaze fires
of pinon wood, full of resin and burning as nothing else can burn save
driftwood, sodden with salt and oil and the mystery of old ocean.

Then, after a little, there arrived in town a vaulted box, in which the
dullest fancy might conjecture a piano. Greatly indeed were heads
shaken. If doom were easily invoked, Jane would hardly have lived to
unpack the treasure and help to lift it up the porch steps.

"_Por Dios!_" gasped Ana Vigil. "It must have cost fifty dollars! And
for what good, senora?"

"Lola's taking music-lessons," said Jane. "Her and Edith May Jonas is
learning a duet. I want she should be able to go right on practising."

"Ah!" said Ana, innocently. "She will not say your house now is 'ugly,'
will she? And you, senora, shall you get a longer dress and do your
hair up, so she will not say of you like she did, 'How queer'?"

Jane looked at Ana. Surely she could not mean to be ill-tempered--Ana,
with a face as broad and placid as a standing pool? No, no, Ana was too
simple to wish to pain any one! Yet as Jane dwelt upon Ana's queries,
it came slowly to Jane that certain changes in herself might be well.

She obeyed this wise, if late, impulse, and when Lola came home in June
she had her reward. The girl cried out with surprise as she beheld on
the platform at Lynn that tall figure in a soft gray gown, fashioned
with some pretensions to the mode, but simple and dignified as befitted
Jane's stature and look. There was a bonnet to match, too elderly for
Jane's years, and of a Quakerish form. But this was less the cause for
the general difference in Jane's aspect than the fact that her brown
hair, parted smoothly on the broad, benignant brow, now had its ends
tucked up in a neat knot.

"_Tia! tia!_" exclaimed Lola, herself glowing like a prairie-rose, as
she dashed out of the train. "What have you done? You are good to look
at! Your hair--oh, _asombro!_"