Fortunately for her, solitude was as difficult to find in that slipshod _ménage_ as method or order. When the boys were at school, young Mrs. Garcia, in the disarray that attended the accomplishment of her household tasks, mounted to her first-floor boarder and regaled her with mingled accounts of past splendors and present miseries. Mrs. Garcia spoke freely of her husband and the affluence with which he had surrounded her. The listener, looking at the faded, blond prettiness of her foolish face, wondered how the Juan Garcia that Gamaliel Barron had described could have loved her. Mariposa had yet to learn that Nature mates the strong men of the world to the feeble women, in an effort to maintain an equilibrium. Once or twice the old señora came upstairs, carrying some dainty in a covered dish. She had been born at Monterey and had come to San Francisco as a bride in the late fifties, but had never learned English, speaking the sonorous Spanish of her girlhood to every one she met, whether it was understood or not. Even in the complete wreck of fortune and position, in which Mariposa saw her, she was a fine example of the highest class of Spanish Californian, that once brilliant and picturesque race, careless, simple, lazy, happy, lords of a kingdom whose value they never guessed, possessors of limitless acres on which their cattle grazed. The day after Shackleton’s death Mrs. Willers appeared, still aghast at the suddenness of the catastrophe. Mariposa did not know that a few days previously, Shackleton had acquainted the newspaper woman with his intention of sending her to Paris with Miss Moreau, the post of correspondent to _The Trumpet_ being assigned to her. It had been the culminating point of Mrs. Willers’ life of struggle. Now all that lay shattered. Be it said to her credit her disappointment was more for the girl than for herself. She knew that Shackleton had made no definite arrangements for the starting of Mariposa on her way. All had been _in statu quo_, attending on the daughter’s recovery from her mother’s loss. Now death had stepped in and forever closed the door upon these hopes.