Her experience of men was small. Once in Sacramento, when she was eighteen, she had received an offer from a young lawyer, and two years ago, in Santa Barbara, she had been the recipient of a second, from a prosperous rancher. Both had been refused without hesitation, and had left no mark on imagination or heart. Then, at a critical period of her life--lonely, poor, a stranger in a strange city--she had fallen in with Essex, and for the first time felt the thrill at the sound of a footstep, the quickening pulse and flushing cheek at the touch of a hand, that she had read of in novels. She thought that nobody had seen this; but the eyes of the dangerous man under whose spell she had fallen were watching her with wary yet ardent interest. He had known her now for three months and had seen her frequently. His visits at the Pine Street cottage were augmented by occasional meetings at Mrs. Willers’, when that lady was at home and receiving company, and by walks together. Of late, too, he had asked her to go to the theater with him. Lucy was always included in these invitations, but was unable to go. The theater was an untarnished delight to Mariposa, and to refuse her the joy of an evening spent there was not in the mother’s heart. Moreover, Lucy, in her agony at the thought of leaving the girl alone in the world, watched Essex with a desperate anxiety trying to fathom his feelings. It seemed to the unworldly woman, that this attractive gentleman might have been sent by fate to be the husband who was to love and guard the child when the mother was gone. A few days after the party at Mrs. Willers’ rooms Essex had invited Mariposa to go with him to a performance of “Il Trovatore,” to be given at Wade’s opera-house. The company, managed by a Frenchman called Lepine, was one of those small foreign ones that in those days toured the West to their own profit and the pleasure of their audiences. The star was advertised as a French diva of European renown. Essex had heard her on the continent, and pronounced her well worth hearing, if rather too fat to be satisfying to the esthetic demands of the part of Leonora. Grand opera was still something of a rarity in San Francisco and it promised to be an occasion. The papers printed the names of those who had bought boxes. Mariposa had read that evening that Jacob Shackleton would occupy the left-hand proscenium box with his wife and family. “His daughter,” said Mariposa, standing in front of the glass as she put on finishing touches, “is ugly, Mrs. Willers says. I think that’s the way it ought to be. It wouldn’t be fair to be an heiress and handsome.” “It wouldn’t be fair for you to be an heiress, certainly,” commented the mother from her armchair. “You don’t think I abuse the privilege a penniless girl has of being good-looking?” said Mariposa, turning from the glass with a twinkling eye.