Magdalena crossed the hall and tapped at the door of the small room her father called his office. Don Roberto grunted, and she opened the door and went in. He was writing, and wheeled about sharply. "What?" he exclaimed. "What the devil! Take that shawl off the head." Magdalena removed the shawl and sat down. "I went to a fire," she said. "I got taken up by a policeman and went to the station. A man named Tom Shannon said he wouldn't lock me up, and sent me home. He paid for the carriage." She paused, looking at her father with white lips. His face had turned livid, then purple. "_Dios!_" he gasped. "_Dios!_" And then she knew how furious her father was. When his life was in even tenor he never used his native tongue. "_Dios!_" he repeated. "Tell that again. You go with that little devil, Helena Belmont, I suppose. _Madre de Dios!_ Again! Again!" "I went to a fire--south of Market Street. A policeman arrested me for a vagrant. He called me a greaser--" Her father sprang to his feet with a yell of rage. He caught his riding-whip from the mantel. She stumbled to her feet. "Papa!" she said. "Papa! You will not do that!" A few moments later she was in her own room. The stars shone full on her pretty altar. She turned her back on it and sat down on the floor. She had not uttered a word as her father beat her. Even now she barely felt the welts on her back. But her self-respect had been cut through at every blow, and it quivered and writhed within her. She hated her father and she hated life with an intensity which added to her misery, and she decided that she had made her last confession to any one but the priest, who always forgave her. If she did wrong in the future and her father found it out, well and good; but she would not be the one to tell him. VII It was a part of her punishment that she was to be locked in her room until Helena left for New York; but Helena visited her every night in her time-honoured fashion. Magdalena never told of the blows, but confinement was a sufficient excuse to her restless friend for any amount of depression; and Helena coaxed twenty dollars out of her father and bought books and bonbons for the prisoner, which she carefully disposed about her person before making the ascent. Magdalena hid her presents in a bureau drawer; and it is idle to deny that they comforted her. One of the books was "Jane Eyre," and another Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. They fired her with enthusiasm, and although she cried all night after the equally tearful Helena had said good-bye to her, she returned to them next day with undiminished enthusiasm. The Sunday after Helena's departure she was permitted to go to church. She was attended by her mother's maid, a French girl and a fervid Catholic. St. Mary's Cathedral, in which Don Roberto owned a pew that he never occupied, was at that time on the corner of California and Dupont streets.