Four months after the death of Dan Moreau his adopted daughter, Mariposa, sat at the piano, in a small cottage on Pine Street, in San Francisco, singing. Her performance was less melodious than remarkable, for she was engaged in “trying her voice.” This was Mariposa’s greatest claim to distinction, and, she hoped, to fortune. With it she dreamed of conquering fame and bringing riches to her mother and herself. She was so far from either of these goals that she permitted herself to speculate on them as one does on impossible glories. The merits of her voice were as unknown in San Francisco as she was. Its cultivation had been a short and exciting episode, relinquished for lack of means. Now it was not only given up, but Mariposa was teaching piano herself, and was feverishly exalted when, the week before, her three pupils had been augmented by a fourth. Four pupils, at fifty cents a lesson, brought in four dollars a week--sixteen a month. “If I make sixteen dollars a week after four months’ work,” Mariposa had said to her mother, on the acquisition of this fourth pupil, “then in one year I ought to make thirty-two dollars a month. Don’t you think that’s a reasonable way of reckoning?” From which it will be seen that Mariposa was not only young in years, but a novice at the work of wage-earning. She was in reality twenty-five years of age, but passed as, and believed herself to be, twenty-four. She had developed into one of those lordly women, stately of carriage, wide of shoulder and deep of breast, that California grows so triumphantly. She had her mother’s thick, red-brown hair, with its flat loose ripple and the dog’s brown eyes to match, a skin as white as a blanched almond with a slight powdering of freckles over her nose, and lips that were freshly red and delicately defined against the warm pallor surrounding them. She was, in fact, a beautified likeness of the Lucy that Moreau saw come gropingly back to youth and desirableness in the cabin on the flank of the Sierra. Only happiness and refinement and a youth passed in an atmosphere of love, had given her all that richness of girlhood, that effervescent confidence and joy of youth that poor Lucy had never known. Despite her air of a young princess, her proudly-held head, her almost Spanish dignity, where only her brown eyes looked full of alertness and laughter, she was in character and knowledge of life foolishly young--in reality, a little girl masquerading in the guise of a triumphantly maturing womanhood. Her life had been one of quietude and seclusion. Her parents had been agreed in their desire for this; the father in the fear of a reëncounter with some phantom from the past. Lucy’s ostensible reason was her own delicate health; but her dread was that Shackleton might see his child and claim her. It seemed impossible to the adoring mother that any father could see this splendid daughter and not rise up and call her his before all men.