It was not possible for nature to struggle triumphant through the disguise this beneficiary chose to assume, but there was an unwilling conviction in the Moulton family that when Catalina arrayed herself as other women she would blossom forth into something of a beauty. Even her stiff hat half covered her brow and rich brown hair, but her eyes, long and dark and far apart, rarely failed to arrest other eyes, immobile as was their common expression. Always independent of her fellow-mortals, and peculiarly of her present companions, she was a happy pagan at the moment, and meditating a solitary retreat to another grove of acacias down by the Saône, when her attention was claimed by Mr. Moulton. “Would you mind coming here a moment, Catalina?” he asked, in a voice whose roll and cadence told that he had led in family prayers these many years, if not in meeting. “After all, it is your suggestion, and I think you should present the case. I have done it very badly, and they don’t seem inclined to listen to me.” He smiled apologetically, but there was a faint twinkle in his eye which palliated the somewhat sanctimonious expression of the lower part of his face. Blond and cherubic in youth, his countenance had grown in dignity as time changed its tints to drab and gray, reclaimed the superfluous flesh of his face, and drew the strong lines that are the half of a man’s good looks. He, too, had his hands in his pockets, and he stood in front of his wife and daughters, who sat on a bench in the perfumed shade of the acacias. His cousin once removed dragged down her eyes and scowled, without attempt at dissimulation. In a moment, however, she came forward with a manifest attempt to be human and normal. Mrs. Moulton stiffened her spine as if awaiting an assault, and her oldest daughter, a shade more formal and correct, more afraid of doing the wrong thing, fixed a cold and absent eye upon the statue to liberty in the centre of the Place. Only the second daughter, Lydia, just departing from her first quarter-century, turned to the alien relative with a sparkle in her eye. She was a girl about whose pink-and-white-and-golden prettiness there was neither question nor enthusiasm, and her thin, graceful figure and alertly poised head received such enhancement as her slender purse afforded. She wore—need I record it?—a travelling-suit of dark-blue brilliantine, short—but at least three inches longer than Catalina’s—and a large hat about whose brim fluttered a blue veil. She admired and a little feared the recent acquisition from California, experiencing for the first time in her life a pleasing suspense in the vagaries of an unusual character. She and all that hitherto pertained to her belonged to that highly refined middle class nowhere so formal and exacting as in the land of the free. Catalina, who never permitted her relatives to suspect that she was shy, assumed her most stolid expression and abrupt tones.