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“Why ‘Forty-niner’ hasn’t come yet! We can’t possibly go and leave him behind! Does anybody know where he is?” there was no reply save the warning whistle of the locomotive and the conductor’s hoarse command: “All aboard!”

Till Aunt Sally fancied a solution, crying:

“My suz! I believe he’s gone an’ broke another leg!”

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For a time after the train pulled out from the station at Los Angeles, Jessica Trent saw nothing for the mist of tears which blurred her eyes; save that framed in that mist was the sad, beautiful face of her mother. How pale it had been! Yet how quiet the dear voice bidding her “be worthy” of that dead father, whose representative she must be. For his sake she was to be educated. For his sake, to carry out his high ideals, she had had to leave her home and “learn life.”

“That was it, more than books, my mother said. ‘Life.’ As if there were not the best sort of life at dear Sobrante!” she murmured, fancying the loud “chug-chug” of the train would cover her voice.