rather heavy but
stately elegance of the mansion in San Francisco.

On the June day on which Elsie was expected, Miss Pritchard confessed
to the friend at the office to whom she had spoken before, that she was
beginning to feel nervous.

"I almost wish she weren't coming until a week later," she said. "Do
you know, I think if I had actually passed my fiftieth birthday, I
might feel somehow more solid and fortified. It's really an ordeal for
an old-fashioned woman like myself to encounter the modern girl of
sixteen. Fifty might pull through, but oh, dear, what of forty-nine
plus?"

She was interrupted by the telephone. A telegram which had come to the
boarding-house for her was read to her. She was smiling as she hung up
the receiver.

"Well, what do you think!" she cried. "My young relative has decided
for some reason to take a later train and has telegraphed me to that
effect. Now there's something rather alert and self-reliant about
that. That girl must have something in her, after all. I can no more
imagine her mother or any of the family getting off at any stage of a
through journey than I could fancy myself not getting off for a fire or
an earthquake or, perhaps, for a wild West show. At the very least,
there's a sort of suppleness of mind indicated."

She stood that evening in the station watching the throng emerging from
the coaches of the train her cousin had given as hers. A tall,
straight woman, large without being stout, her plain face, with large,
irregular features, framed in plainly parted iron-grey hair, was
singularly strong and fine, and her grey eyes betokened experience
bravely met. As she scanned the face of every young girl in the
procession, there was something so staunch and true in her appearance
as to make it almost striking.

Then on a sudden, right in the midst of it, for a moment she forgot all
about Elsie Marley, and what she was standing there for, in the vision
that confronted her and surprisingly and instantaneously took her
romantic heart by storm. A young girl came straight toward her--such a
piquant, sparkling, buoyant young thing as she had never seen before--a
small, slender, dark-eyed creature with short brown hair cut square
like a little boy's and a charming mouth flanked by dimples that were
almost like pockets.

So much she took in in that one long glance. Then, recovering herself,
fearful lest she had been lost to all else about her longer than she
knew,