Her beauty, somewhat in eclipse for a time, presently shone out again.  But there were few to see it.  Miss Watts, the simple, sweet, middle-aged teacher of the kindergarten, admired it wistfully, and Miss Toland watched it with secret pride.  But the society girls and young matrons who flitted in once or twice a week to teach their classes never saw it at all, or, seeing it, merely told each other that little Miss Page would be awfully pretty in decent things, and the women and girls and children who formed the classes at The Alexander never saw her at all.  The women were too much absorbed in their own affairs, children are proverbially blind to beauty, and the girls who came to the monthly dances, the evening sewing classes and reading clubs, thought their sober little guardian rather plain, as indeed she was, when judged by their standard of dress, their ruffled lace collars and high-heeled shoes, their curls and combs and coloured glass jewellery.

Julia’s amazing detachment from the ordinary ideals of girlhood was an unending surprise to Miss Toland.

“She has simply and quietly set that astonishing little mind of hers upon making herself a lady,” Miss Toland said now and then to her sister-in-law.  Mrs. Toland would answer with only an abstracted smile.  If she had any convictions at all in her genial view of life, she certainly believed a lady to be a thing born, not made.  But she was not concerned about Julia; she hardly realized the girl’s existence.

Miss Toland, however, was keenly concerned about Julia.  Julia had come to be the absorbing interest of her life.  It was quite natural that Julia should love her, yet to the older woman it always seemed a miracle, tremulously dear.  That any one so young, so lovely, so ardent as Julia should depend so utterly upon her was to Anna Toland an unceasing delight.  Julia had been bewildered and heartsick when she turned to The Alexander, but she had never in her life known such an aching loneliness as had been Miss Toland’s fate for many years.  To such a nature the solitary years in Paris, the solitary return to California, the tentative and unencouraged approaches to her nieces, all made a dark memory.  Rich as she was, independent and popular as she was, Miss Toland’s life had brought her nothing so sweet as this young thing, to teach, to dominate, to correct, and to watch and delight in, too.  As Julia’s grammar and manner and appearance rapidly improved, Miss Toland began to exploit her, in a quiet way, and quietly gloried in the girl’s almost stern dignity.  When the members of the board of directors were buzzing about, Julia, with her neatly written report, was a little study in alert and silent efficiency.

“She’s a cute little thing,” said Mrs. von Hoffmann, president of The Alexander Toland Neighbourhood House, after one of these meetings of the board, “but she never has much to say.”

“No, she’s a very silent girl,” Miss Toland agreed, with that little warmth at her heart the thought of Julia always brought.