Rachael had great fear and respect for her great-grandmother, and everything that was fine and good in the child instinctively responded to the atmosphere of her little home.  It was an unpretentious home, even for Los Lobos:  only a whitewashed California cabin with a dooryard full of wall flowers and geraniums, and pungent marigolds, and marguerites that were budding, blossoming, and gone to rusty decay on one and the same bush.  The narrow paths were outlined with white stone ale-bottles, turned upside down and driven into the soft ground, and under the rustling tent of a lilac bush there were three or four clay pots filled with dry earth.  There was a railed porch on the east side of the house, with vines climbing on strings about it, and here the old woman, clean with the wonderful, cool-fingered cleanness of frail yet energetic seventy-five, would sit reading in the afternoon shade that fell from the great shoulders of the blue mountains.

Inside were three rooms; there was no bathroom, no light but the kerosene lamps the old hands tended daily, no warmth but the small kitchen stove.  All the furniture was old and shabby and cheap, and the antimacassars and pictures and teacups old Mrs. Mumford prized so dearly were of no value except for association’s sake.  Rachael’s great-grandmother lived upon tea and toast and fruit sauce; sometimes she picked a dish of peas in her own garden and sometimes made herself a rice pudding, but if her children brought her in a chicken or a bowl of soup she always gave it away to some poorer neighbor who was ill, or who was “nursing that great strapping baby.”

She read the Bible to Rachael and exhorted the half-believing, half-ashamed child to lay its lessons to heart.

“Your life will be full of change and of pleasure, there will be many temptations and much responsibility,” said the sweet, stern, thin old voice.  “Arm yourself against the wickedness of the world!”

Rachael, pulling the old collie’s silky ears, thought nothing of the wickedness of the world but much of possible change and pleasure.  She hoped her aged relative was right; certainly one would suppose Granny to be right in anything she said.

The time would have swiftly come when the child’s changing heart would have found no room for this association, but before Rachael was twelve Granny was gone, the little house, with its few poor treasures shut inside it, was closed and empty.  And only a year or two later a far more important change came into the girl’s life.  She had always disliked Los Lobos, had schemed and brooded and fretted incessantly through her childhood.  It was with astonished delight that she heard that her parents, who had never, in a financial sense, drawn a free breath since their marriage, who had worried and contrived, who had tried indifference and bravado and strictest economy by turns, had sold their ranch for almost two thousand dollars more than its accumulated mortgages, and were going to England.