Sitting on the flat lid of the trunk, with one foot tucked under her for comfort, while Mary crouched on the floor with her rose-leaf cheeks in her palms, Pearl Newcome would read whole chapters from “Fanny the Flower Girl, or the Pits and Pitfalls of London,” from “Lady Clare, or Lord Marchmont’s Unhappy Bride,” from “The Doge’s Doom, or the Mysterious Swordsman of Venice,” and many others. The mysterious swordsman in the “Doge’s Doom” was especially entrancing, for he went about at night with a black mask over his face, and made love and fought duels with the greatest imaginable nonchalance. It taxed the memory merely to keep count of his many loves and battles, and it was darkly hinted that he was a royal personage in disguise. “The Black Mask’s scabbard clanked ominously as he sprang from the gondola to the stone arches below the sombre building, while the moonlight was reflected from his shining coat of mail and from the placid waters of the deep lagoon, showing in the pellucid waves alike the untamed locks that hung about his shoulders and the white frightened face of the slender, golden-haired maiden who leaned toward him with palpitating bosom from the narrow, open window above him.” When that point was reached Mary clasped her hands tightly across her knees and rocked in aching excitement; for who was to know whether the Black Mask would succeed in getting the lovely maiden out of the clutches of the foul doge who held her a prisoner, or whether some guard concealed in a niche in the wall would not pounce out, having been set there by the shrewd doge for the purpose, and slice the Black Mask’s head off, in spite of the protecting coat of mail? Aside from her duties as housekeeper, which she never neglected, there was one other thing that could cause Pearl Newcome to surrender voluntarily the joys of that perch on the trunk lid in the midst of her redolent romances with Mary Jasper for an appreciative listener, and that was the voice of Steve Harkness, the ranch foreman. The attraction of the printed page palled when she heard Harkness’s heavy tones, and stopping, with her finger between the leaves, she would step to the window; and sometimes, to Mary’s regret, would go down stairs, where she would cut out a huge triangle of pie and place it on the kitchen table.