They all went to the station to see the Boggs's off, and, as the train moved out, they saw a pair of tearful eyes at the car window, and that was the last of Daniella for many a day. Both she and her mother had been comfortably provided for through many contributions of clothing and money, so they did not go away empty-handed.
"Well," said Nan with a long sigh as they watched the smoke from the train drift toward the mountains, "I am glad we can think of them somewhere else than in that lonely little cabin up there."
"It is a comfort," said Mary Lee, "but I really shall miss Daniella very much, and hasn't she learned a lot since that time we found her, a wild, little scary thing in the mountains?"
"Aunt Helen says there are all sort of possibilities in Daniella, if she ever gets any sort of a chance."
"She won't get much on a ranch," returned Mary Lee.
"Who knows?" said Nan thoughtfully.
Nan's music lessons commenced before the holidays were over. She went three times a week to her Aunt Helen, and, although there were days when instead of wrist movements, five finger exercises, and close legato, she gave more time to playing tunes by ear, on the whole, she was conscientious in her practicing, and it took very few words to fire her ambition or to make her appreciate the necessity of patient striving.
"All musicians must go through just this uninteresting drudgery," her aunt would tell her. "Think, Nan, even Beethoven and Chopin and Wagner had to train their fingers by these exercises and scales, so you must not expect to do less." Then Nan would try her utmost and the next time would show the improvement naturally following diligent, painstaking study. It was fortunate for her that Miss Helen knew how to appeal to her imagination and that she varied her talks, upon the dry details, with little anecdotes of the great masters, and with snatches of their best compositions to illustrate what she was saying, so that Nan, with her knowledge of the rudiments of music, gained also a knowledge of musical history which made her work much more interesting.
At this time Nan and Mary Lee, too, were fired with an ambition to further improve their minds, this following certain talks with their Aunt Helen, and they determined upon a course of reading.