It was a glorious adventure for Rachael, even though she was too shrewd not to suspect the extreme hazard of the move.  She talked in Los Lobos of her father’s “people,” hinted that “the family, you know, thinks we’d better be there,” but she knew in her heart that a few months might find them all beggars.

Her father bought her a loose, big, soft blue coat in San Francisco, and a dashing little soft hat for the steamer.  Rachael never forgot these garments throughout her entire life.  It mattered not how countrified the gown under the coat, how plain the shoes on her slender feet.  Their beauty, their becomingness, their comfort, actually colored her days.  For twenty dollars she was transformed; she knew herself to be pretty and picturesque.  “That charming little girl with the dark braids, going to England,” she heard some man on the steamer say.  The ranch, the chickens, weeds, and preserving, the dusty roads and shabby stores of Los Lobos were gone; she was no longer a gawky child; she was a young lady in a loose, soft, rough blue coat, with a black quill in her soft blue hat.

England received her wandering son coolly, but Rachael never knew it.  Her radiant dream—­or was it an awakening?—­went on.  Her mother, a neat, faded, querulous little woman, whose one great service was in sparing her husband any of the jars of life, was keyed to frantic anxiety lest Jerry be unappreciated, now that he had come back.  Clara met the few men to whom her husband introduced her in London with feverish eagerness; afraid—­after fifteen years—­to say one word that might suggest her own concern in Jerry’s future, quivering to cross-examine him, when they were alone, as to what had been said, and implied, and suggested.

Nothing definite followed.  They lived for a month or two at a delightful roomy boarding-house in London, where the modest meals Clara ordered appeared as if by magic, and where Miss Fairfax never sullied her pretty hands with dishwashing.  Then they went to visit “Aunt Elsie” in a suburban villa for several weeks, a visit Rachael never thought of afterward without a memory of stuffy, neat, warm rooms, and a gushing of canaries’ voices.  Then they went down to Sussex, in the delicious fullness of spring, to live with several other persons in a dark country house, where “Cousin Harold” died, and there was much odorous crepe and a funeral.  Cousin Harold evidently left something to Gerald.  Rachael knew money was not an immediate problem.  Hot weather came, and they went to the seaside with an efficient relative called Ethel, and Ethel’s five children.  Later, back in London, Gerald said, in his daughter’s hearing, that he had made “rather a good thing of that little game of Bobbie’s.  Enough to tide us over—­what?  Especially if the Dickies ask us down for a bit,” he had added.  The Dickies did ask them down for a bit.  They went other places.  Gerald made a little money on the races, made “a good thing” of this, and “turned a bit over on that.”  Weeks made months and months years, and still they drifted cheerfully about, Gerald happier than he had ever been in exile, Clara fearful, admiring, ill at ease, Rachael in a girl’s paradise.