She used to come, uninvited but serene, into her prospective mother-in-law's room at night, and artlessly confide in her, while she braided the masses of her glorious hair. She showed Mrs. Phelps the "swell" pillow she was embroidering to represent an Indian's head, and which she intended to finish with real beads and real feathers. She was as eagerly curious as a child about the older woman's dainty toilet accessories, experimenting with manicure sets and creams and powders with artless pleasure. "I'm going to have that and do it that way!" she would announce, when impressed by some particular little nice touch about Cornelia's letters, or some allusion that gave her a new idea. "If you ever come to Boston, you will be expected to know all these things," Mrs. Phelps said to her once, a little curiously. "Oh, but I'll never go there!" she responded confidently. "You will have to," said the other, sharply. "Austin can hardly spend his whole life here! His friends are there, his family. All his traditions are there. Those may not mean much to him now, but in time to come they will mean more." "We'll make more money than we can spend, right here," Manzanita said, in a troubled voice. "Money is not everything, my dear." "No--" Manzanita's brown fingers went slowly down to the last fine strands of the braid she was finishing. Then she said, brightening: "But I AM everything to Aus! I don't care what I don't know, or can't do, HE thinks I'm fine!" And she went off to bed in high spirits. She was too entirely normal a young woman to let anything worry her very long,--too busy to brood. The visitor soon learned why the ranch-house parlor presented so dismal an aspect of unuse. It was because Manzanita was never inside it. The girl's days were packed to the last instant with duties and pleasures. She needed no parlor. Even her bedroom was as bare and impersonal as her father's. She was never idle. Mrs. Phelps more than once saw the new-born child of a rancher's or miner's wife held in those capable young arms, she saw the children at the mine gathering about Manzanita, the women leaving their doorways for eager talk with her. And once, during the Eastern woman's visit, death came to the Yerba Buena, and Manzanita and young Jose spent the night in one of the ranch-houses, and walked home, white, tired, and a little sobered, in the early morning, for breakfast.