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, señora?" "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, señora, 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!_" But when the white burros of the mail wagon, wildly skimming the plains, brought them in sight of the new house, Lola's joy turned white on her cheeks, and she clutched Jane's arm. "_Tia_--our house! It is gone--gone!" Then was Jane's time to laugh with sheer happiness, to throw open gate and door and usher her guest into the old room where Tesuque sat and the Navajo blanket still covered the couch as of yore, and nothing was altered except that now other rooms opened brightly on all sides, and in one a piano displayed its white teeth in beaming welcome. Lola's blank face, whereon every moment printed a new delight, was to Jane a sight hardly to be matched. The satisfaction grew also with time, as the piano awoke to such strains as Lola had mastered, and people strolled up from the village ways to listen, and, to Jane's deep gratification, to praise the musician. The Mexicans came in throngs, filling the air with a chorus of "_Caspitas!_" and "_Carambas!_" None of them called Lola "_Infanta_" nowadays unless it were in a spirit of friendly pleasantry; and she herself had lost much of the air which had brought this contemptuous honor upon her childish head.