HARD-PAN

A STORY OF BONANZA FORTUNES

BY

GERALDINE BONNER

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1900

Copyright, 1900, by
The Century Co.
The De Vinne Press.

HARD-PAN

I

DINNER was coming to an end. The Chinaman, soft-footed in his immaculate white, had just finished his circuit of the table, leaving a tiny gold-rimmed coffee-cup at each of the four plates. Into hers Letitia was lowering a lump of sugar, when a thought occurred to her, and she dropped the sugar into the cup with a little splash, and looking across at her vis-Ã -vis, said:

“Oh, John, I’ve been going to ask you half a dozen of times, and have always forgotten: did you know that Colonel Ramsay Reed had a daughter?”

To see the effect of her question, she stretched forward a plump white hand and tilted to one side one of the pink silk petticoats that veiled the candle-flames. The obstruction removed, she looked with vivacious interest at the person to whom she had addressed her query. He, too, had just dropped his sugar into his coffee, and was stirring it slowly, watching the little maelstrom in the cup.

“Colonel Ramsay Reed,” he said, without looking up. “Yes, I think I’ve heard something about his having a daughter. But why do you ask me? Isn’t Maud a much better person? She knows everything about everybody.”

He glanced at his sister-in-law, the dark, brown-eyed woman, very splendid in her white-and-yellow dress, who sat at the head of the small table. It was just a family party—Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Gault, Mrs. Mortimer’s sister, Letitia Mason, and Mortimer’s brother, John Gault. Mrs. Gault, who seemed to be quite oblivious to the impertinence of her brother-in-law’s remark, answered smartly:

“I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that Colonel Reed had daughters by the dozens. Who knows really anything about those old bonanza men who’ve lost their bonanzas? They drop out of sight, and nobody ever hears of them again. Colonel Reed was in his glory before I was born.”

This was a slight exaggeration. Mrs. Mortimer Gault had been born a full thirty-eight years ago, in a house which now has a bakery beneath and furnished rooms above, in the environs of North Beach. It was quite fitting and proper that she should have first seen the light there, as in that day North Beach was fashionable. But that this should have occurred thirty-eight years ago was a subject she quietly ignored. She was still so effective in her dark, quick-flashing style, so much admired and so fond of being admired, that she turned her back on and denied the thirty-eight years whenever she had the chance.

Her husband looked at her with indulgent and humorous appreciation of her quickness.

“I don’t see, if Colonel Reed has a daughter,” he said, “what he keeps her on. She can’t live on the memory of his bonanza glories. The old fellow hasn’t got a cent in the world. White Pine scooped the last dollar he had. When did his wife die?”

Letitia, who was twelve years her sister’s junior, and, even if she had not been, would not have felt sensitive about her accumulating birthdays, answered:

“Oh, long ago. Colonel Reed’s always been a widower ever since I can remember.”

“I remember hearing about his wife when I was a boy,” said Mortimer. “She was a young actress, and married the colonel when everything was going his way. Then she died in a year or two of consumption. I didn’t know there was a child.”

“She must be quite young, then,” said Maud Gault. “What did you hear about her, Letitia?”

“Nothing much; only that she was pretty, and lived in an old ramshackle house somewhere across town, and that nobody knows anything about her. One of the girls was talking about it the other day at Mamie Murray’s lunch, and I thought it was so funny, everybody knowing about Colonel Reed, that he should have had a daughter that none of us had ever heard of. That’s why I asked John. He knows more of those queer, left-over people than anybody else.”

She again tilted the candle-shade and looked at John Gault. For the first time since the conversation had turned on Colonel Reed’s daughter, he met her eyes. His were brown and deep-set, and being near-sighted, he generally wore a pince-nez. He had taken this off, and looked at Letitia with his eyes narrowed to mere slits, after the manner of short-sighted people. Having finished his coffee, he was leaning back, the candle-light striking a smooth gleam from his broad expanse of shirt-bosom. The restless fire of diamonds broke the glossy surface, for John Gault, like many rich Californians of a passing era, clung to the splendid habits of the bonanza days. Sitting thus, he looked a spare, muscular man verging on forty, with dark hair and an iron-gray mustache.

“I don’t know whether that’s meant to be a compliment,” he said, with the lazy smile with which he generally treated Letitia’s sallies. “Have I got a larger collection of freaks than most people?”

“What did you hear about Colonel Reed’s daughter?” asked Maud Gault.

“Really, I don’t recollect anything in particular,” he said; “probably just what Letitia heard—that she was pretty and lived somewhere across town.”

“If a man’s going to remember everything he hears about girls that are pretty and live somewhere across town, he’d have to get Professor What’s-his-name’s Memory System down by heart,” said Mortimer, pushing back his chair. “Come, Maud, you don’t want to sit here all night, do you?”

They rose, and together, the rustling ladies first, passed through the intervening hall into the drawing-room beyond. It was a warm, glossy, much-upholstered room, with an appearance of overcrowded cheeriness. Lamps casting halos of mellow light through beruffled silk shades like huge primeval flowers, glowed from the corners and sent glistening rays along the leaves of tropical plants. The ornaments disposed upon the tables and mantel-shelves were numerous and interesting enough to have claimed an afternoon’s careful attention. There were mounds of cushions on the divans, and sudden prolongations of the surroundings in unexpected mirrors. Framed in the folds of the portières was the bright, distant picture of the deserted dining-table, with its bloom of candles and glint of glass and silver.

The small family party all knew one another so well, and so constantly met for these little informal dinners, that when John Gault excused himself on the ground of an evening engagement, no one criticized his defection or urged him to stay. Letitia, who had put on her new pink gauze dinner-dress that evening, was more hurt by the fact that he did not comment upon its splendors than that he left so early. She was used to his unceremonious inclusion of herself in the family party, whom he called by their Christian names and treated with brotherly informality.

This evening, as usual, she went into the hall with him for a last word or two while he put on his coat. Secretly she was hoping that he would notice her dress; for if Letitia had a weakness, it was for rich apparel. Fortunately she could indulge it. She had a fair fortune in her own right, and being an orphan who made her home with her married sister, her income was hers to spend as she pleased.

Standing under the hall light, she regarded Gault with grave attention as he attempted, alone and unaided, to put on his coat. Then, seeing the unequal nature of the struggle, she said suddenly, “Let me help you, John,” and taking the garment from him, shook it and held it out to him by the collar.

He laughed, and thrusting an arm into the sleeve, said over his shoulder:

“You’re not only the most ornamental but the most useful person I know, Letitia.”

“Thanks,” she responded sedately; “but I wouldn’t have supposed you thought I was so ornamental.”

“Why not?” he answered, affecting as dramatic a surprise as was possible in his position, with his second arm just thrust into the sleeve.

“Because you never noticed me to-night at all,” said Letitia, giving the collar a settling jerk.

“Never noticed you?” He was able to turn round on her now, and regarded her with exaggerated astonishment. “What do you mean? I noticed you more than I did any one else.”

“I didn’t mean myself, exactly; I meant my gown.”

“That shows how a feeling silence is thrown away on a woman. I noticed it a dozen times; but just because I didn’t say so you suppose I was blind to it. How could I be?”

He stepped back and looked critically at Letitia standing where the light of the hall lamp fell softly over her.

“But you know,” he said, “it wouldn’t be strange for a man not to notice the dress, because the person who has it on is so much better worth looking at than any dress.”

Letitia’s delight at this compliment could not be disguised. She blushed and tried not to smile, and looked as childishly pleased as a woman can who is five feet nine inches high, and has the massive proportions and noble outlines of a Greek goddess.

She was, in truth, a fine creature, large, statuesque, and handsome, as Californian women are handsome, with the beauty of form and color. Viewed critically, her features were not without defects; but her figure was superb in its type, her skin was flawless, and her naturally rich coloring was still further intensified by the reddish hue that had been imparted to her hair by some artificial means. In the full panoply of evening dress there was something magnificently vivid, almost startling, about her. One could imagine a stranger, who had come suddenly upon her in a doorway or on a staircase, standing mute, with caught breath, staring.

To-night, touched into higher brilliancy by the new pink dress, her beauty even struck Gault’s accustomed eye, and his compliment had more sincerity in it than is usually found in those administered to relations. Then, amused at her girlishly naïve pleasure, he bade her a laughing good night, and without waiting for her response, opened the door and let himself out.

The Mortimer Gaults lived in the newest and most fashionable part of San Francisco. Two years before they had leased one of the houses that have sprung up, alone or in groups of three or four, throughout that quarter of the city where Pacific Avenue runs out along the edges of the sand-hills. Here the undulating lines of the great dunes, dreaming under the ceaseless hush, hush, hush of the wind sweeping through the rank sea-grass, have been hidden under the march of progress. Large new houses, shining with paint and bright with window-boxes, have settled on the slopes, and now hold the sand down. A layer of earth and a hose have transformed the haggard face of the dunes into gardens which would be a mass of vegetation but for the French gardeners’ restraining shears.

The house rented by the Gaults, a solid, pale-hued building of the colonial form of architecture, was large, new, and imposing. Flowers drooped over its façade from many window-boxes. Its porch was verdurous with great leafy plants growing in tubs and earthenware pots. In the front there was a close-clipped strip of lawn, with neat borders and a filamentosa palm, and the lower part of the bulging bay-window was hidden by the close, fine foliage of an ivy geranium.

Faring down the street with a quick step, John Gault passed many such dwellings, the homes of the city’s well-to-do and wealthy. Here and there an undrawn blind afforded him a glimpse of a glowing interior, where the tall, shrouded lamp cast its light over a room as gaily brilliant as the one he had just left. But his eye traveled over the illuminated pane with unseeing preoccupation. He walked rapidly, and with the undeviating glance of inward reflection. Once he stopped at a corner lamp and looked at his watch. Then he hastened his steps, and a few blocks farther on boarded a cross-town car.

The part of the city toward which he was going was of a very different aspect and period. His car passed from the quiet gentility of the West Side toward the hum and glare of the business quarter. It swept him through streets full of the rank and ugly sidewalk life of a great city after dark to where Market Street, the town’s main artery, throbbed and roared with the traffic of the night.

The line he had taken reached its terminus here, and he alighted, made his way through the crowd and clangor of the wide thoroughfare, and plunged into the streets beyond.

Here at once the wayfarer feels himself in a locality whence prosperity and fashion have withdrawn themselves. The ill-lit streets, the small and squalid shops, the sordid faces of the passers-by, tell their own tale of a region fallen from grace. John Gault had too often passed this way for the ruinous aspect of the surroundings to possess any interest for him. With a thin thread of cigarette smoke streaming out above his upturned collar, he passed on rapidly through the patches of shadow and garish light from show-windows. People turned and looked at him sharply, his noticeable figure being an unusual one in that locality. To one watching it might have seemed that this curiosity annoyed him, for he quickened his pace, and at the first side street turned off to the left.

There were fewer wayfarers here; the lamps were far apart, and on either hand the dark forms of huge houses, their façades showing only an occasional light in an upper window, loomed vague and forbidding. The dreariness of desertion seemed to hold them in a spell, as they rose, brooding and black, from the dimness of overgrown gardens. This had been one of the great streets in San Francisco’s splendid heyday. Here millionairedom had built its palaces and held its revels. John Gault remembered some of them, and now his eye passed blankly over the lines of darkened windows and the wide porticos where years before, on his vacations from college, he had entered as a guest.

But his thoughts were elsewhere.

How strange that the conversation should have taken that turn at dinner! Could Letitia have heard anything? Impossible! Even if she had, she was too simple-minded and direct to be so manœuvering. This was the seventh time he had been to see Viola Reed—the seventh time in less than three months. What did he go for? He laughed a little to himself at the question, and throwing his head back, blew a film of cigarette smoke into the night. What did he go for? To pass the evenings, that otherwise would have been idly passed in his own rooms, or dully passed in society, or drearily passed in the pursuit of amusements he had long wearied of, in the society of a girl who pleased his critical taste, beguiled him of his boredom, and piqued his interest and curiosity.

Yes, that was the secret of her attraction for him. She was not like any one he had ever known before. She piqued his curiosity.

A picture of her rose before his mental vision, and with a shamefaced laugh at his own sentiment, he threw his cigarette away. Letitia had said she was pretty. Undoubtedly she was, but she was something more than pretty. Refined, delicate, poetic—there was no word that described it. If Letitia went about talking of her, other people would want to see her. He resented the idea violently, and felt his anger rising at the thought of the coarse curiosity and comment that would suddenly surround her. Some one ought to stop Letitia from talking that way.

“For,” thought John Gault, as he turned a corner and came within view of Colonel Reed’s abode, “I am the prince who has found the Sleeping Beauty.”

The house, like many in that quarter of the city, was detached, and had once been a dwelling with pretensions to gentility. Time and weather had worked their will of it, and even under the kindly veil of night its haggard dilapidation was visible. It sat back a few feet from the street in a square of garden, where a tall dracæna shook its rustling foliage to every breeze. There was a large flowering jasmine-tree by the gate, that spread a sweet scent through the noisome airs of that old and ill-drained quarter. The visitor softly opened the gate and entered up a pathway flagged with squares of black-and-white stone that were broken and uneven. From the front window—a wide bay shrouded in vines—the light squeezed in narrow slits. John Gault pulled the old-fashioned bell and stood listening to its jingling note.

There was a step in the passage within, and the light shone through the two narrow panes of glass that flanked the front door on either side. A key turned and the door was opened. In the aperture Viola Reed stood with a kerosene lamp flickering in her hand. She held a piece of light-colored material in the other hand. As her glance fell on the visitor she made an instinctive movement as if to hide this.

“Oh, is it you?” she said. “Come in. I’m glad you’ve come!”

She uttered the sentences quickly, and was evidently embarrassed. Even by the light of the smoky lamp Gault could see that she had flushed.

“I never thought of your coming to-night,” she said, as she turned to open the parlor door. “It’s a great surprise. My father will be delighted.”

She held the lamp up while the visitor divested himself of his coat and hung it on the chair that did duty as a hat-rack. In the dim hallway, with its walls from which the paper had peeled in long strips, and the stairway beyond, with the twine showing through the ragged carpet, the man of the world in his well-groomed, well-dressed, complacent perfection of finish, presented a curiously incongruous appearance.

The girl opened the door, and he followed her into the parlor. It was a long room, divided in the middle by an archway, its lower end now veiled in shadow. On a large table another lamp glowed, a bunch of paper flowers hanging on one side of the globe to subdue the light. The room gave an impression of lofty emptiness. The footsteps of the visitor seemed to be flung back from its high, bare walls. The lamp struck gleams of light from the gilded frame of a large mirror over the chimney-piece, and here and there caught the running gold arabesques which covered the wall-paper. There were a few wicker chairs drawn up to the table, which was covered with the litter of amateur dressmaking. In the single upholstered chair that the room boasted sat Colonel Ramsay Reed.

With a loud exclamation of pleasure the colonel rose and greeted his guest. He was a remarkable-looking man of sixty-five or seventy, fully six feet in height, erect, alert, with a striking air of distinction in his narrow, hawk-featured face, and a gaunt, angular figure. His white hair flowed nearly to his shoulders, and his white mustache was in singular contrast to the brown and leathery surface of his thin cheeks. He wore a long wrapper of indeterminate hue, patched with materials of different colors and patterns, and a pair of old leather slippers that slipped off his heels when he walked. In his suave and urbane courtesy he seemed to be serenely indifferent to the deficiencies of his costume, folding his dressing-gown round his legs as he subsided into his chair with the deliberate ease that a Roman senator might have displayed in the arrangement of his toga of ceremony.

His daughter did not appear to share his composure; she was nervous and embarrassed. She swept off the evidences of her dressmaking with a few rapid movements, and took them away to the shadows of the far end of the room, hung another paper flower over the blinding glare of the second lamp, and, sitting by the table, let her glance stray furtively about for further details that needed correcting. John Gault, who appeared to be awarding a polite attention to the colonel’s conversational amenities, was conscious of her every movement.

Viola Reed was one of those women that nature seems to have intended to make completely and satisfyingly beautiful, the intention having been changed only at the last moment. The upper half of her head was without a fault—the low forehead, the wonderful hair, thick and wavy, and so instinct with life that every separate filament seemed to stand out from its fellows, in color a warm, bright blond, and with shorter hairs about the ears and temples which curled up in golden threads. In strange contrast with this brilliant hair were level, dark-brown eyebrows, that were low over large gray eyes. She had the same dark-brown lashes, which grew wide apart and turned back, a rare beauty, and one which imparts an expression of soft, wistful tenderness to the eyes thus encircled.

Here Viola’s beauty ended. Her other features were, at least, inoffensive. She was tall and beautifully formed, but in the slenderest mold. To the Californian ideal she was thin. But her movements were distinguished by a supple grace denied to women of a more stately build and proportion. To-night she wore a shirt-waist, washed out from its original pink to a wan flesh-color, and a scanty black stuff skirt, belted with a black ribbon. Gault, with his eyes fixed on the colonel, was aware of the stealthy rearrangement she made of the ribbon round her neck, and the movements of the investigating hand with which she pushed back her loosened hair-pins.

As was her custom, she made little attempt to join in the conversation. The evening settled down into a replica of its predecessors. The fact that Gault was becoming a familiar figure in the bare front parlor did not seem to abate the colonel’s buoyant appreciation of him as a good listener.

The younger man, with his glance on the floor and an expression of polite attention on his face, found himself wondering, with inward amusement, what his friends would say if they could have had a glimpse of him, listening, silently and submissively, to the reminiscences of Colonel Ramsay Reed. The conjecture called up such a picture of incredulous astonishment and disbelief that a smile broke out on his lips. Aware of its incongruity, he stole a quick, apprehensive look at Viola. She was watching him with a surprise evidently tempered by pain at the thought that his amusement might be evoked by her father’s garrulity. Gault’s gravity became intense, and the colonel, who was too engrossed in the joy of having secured a victim to notice anything, went gaily on. He was launched on his favorite subject—the men he had assisted to affluence in the early days.

“There’s Jerry McCormick. You know where he is now? No need to ask any one that; has been a member of Congress, can draw his check for a million, his wife a leader of society, and his daughters marrying English lords. You know them, of course?”

The visitor made an affirmative sign, and the colonel continued:

“Well, I made that man. When I first ran against McCormick he was working in the mines up in Tuolumne, with the water squelching in his boots. In those days a dollar to Jerry looked about as big as a cart-wheel. His wife was glad enough to do a little washing, and his daughter—the youngest ones weren’t born then, but the eldest, the one that married the English lord, was—used to run round barefoot, and bring her father his dinner in a tin pail.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t know what a tin pail is now,” said Gault, a mental picture rising in his mind of the magnificent Lady Courtley as he had seen her on her last visit to her parents.

“No,” said the old man; “I hear she’s one of the Vere de Veres. And I can remember her, a little freckled-faced kid with her hair in her eyes, hanging round the tunnel of the Little Bertha, waiting to give her father his dinner.”

“Do you know the younger McCormick girls, Miss Reed? Lady Courtley was before your time,” said Gault, in an attempt to draw Viola into the conversation.

She looked surprised, and then gave a little laugh and shook her head.

“I’ve never even seen them,” she answered.

“Oh, they don’t know Viola,” said the colonel—not with bitterness, but as one who states a simple and natural fact; “the old woman’s educated them out of all that. But, as I was saying, I made their father. He’d managed to scrape together a little pile, put it all in a small prospect, and lost every nickel. He was just about dead broke, and came to me crying—yes, crying—and said, ‘Colonel Reed, there’s only one man in California whose advice I’d follow and whose opinion I’d trust.’ ‘Who’s that?’ said I, intending to help the poor devil to the best of my ability. ‘It’s Ramsay Reed,’ said he. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if you’ll just put yourself in my hands, and do what I tell you, I’ll set you on your feet.’ ‘Colonel,’ said he, ‘say the word, and whatever it is, it goes. You’ve got more financial ability in your little finger than all the rest of ’em have in their whole bodies.’ So I took him in hand.”

The colonel paused, a reflective smile wrinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes.

“You certainly seem to have made a success of his case,” said Gault, feeling that some comment was expected of him.

“Yes, yes,” said the colonel; “I may say a great success. The poor fellow’s confidence in me made me determined to do my best. I used to give him points—those were the days when I could give points. Told him if he would follow the lead west of the Little Bertha—people had hardly heard of the Little Bertha then—he’d strike it. He was broke, and I gave him the money. Three months later he’d struck pay dirt. That was the beginning of the Alcade Mine, but he didn’t have sense enough to hold on to it, and sold out for a few thousands. I saw then that I’d have to do more than give him an occasional boost, and stood behind him, off and on, for years. Even when we ran into the Virginia City boom he never bought without my advice. He hadn’t any discrimination. I’d just say to him, ‘Save your money and buy five feet next to the Best and Belcher,’ and he’d do what I said every time. Without me he’d have been working in the mines in Tuolumne yet.”

In the absorption of his recollections the colonel crossed his knees, bringing one foot, with a torn slipper dropping from the heel, into a position of prominence.

“Oh, those were days worth living in!” he said, running a long, spare hand through his hair—“great days! Men that weren’t grown then don’t know what life is. I meet Jerry sometimes, but we don’t talk much about old times. He knows that he owes everything to me, and it goes against the grain for him to acknowledge it. I hear his daughters are handsome girls.”

“Perhaps—I don’t know,” said Gault, recalling the occasions when he had sat next to the Miss McCormicks at dinners, and suffered exceedingly in the effort known as “making conversation.”

“I heard that they were fine, handsome girls, large, and with black hair like their mother. She was a beauty in her day—a hot-tempered Irish girl that Jerry married from the wash-tub. The youngest daughter is about Viola’s age—twenty-three.”

John Gault turned and looked at Viola with some surprise.

“You thought I was younger, didn’t you?” she said, smiling. “Everybody does.”

He was about to answer when the colonel once more took up the thread of his reminiscences.

“Maroney was down then—’way down; not even on the lowest rung of the ladder—he wasn’t on the ladder at all. I gave him the first lift he had. No one would look at Maroney in those days. He was a thin, consumptive-looking fellow, full of crazy schemes, forever coming to you and borrowing money for some wild-cat stock that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. I took a fancy to him, and every dollar he made was through my help and advice. It was when I had my offices on Montgomery Street, and he’d have a way of dropping in about lunch-time and hanging round looking poor and sick. I used to take him out to lunch, and give him a square meal and a few points that he’d sense enough to follow. He wasn’t like Jerry; he was smart. Why, I almost fed that man for years. When he’d get down on his luck—and he was always doing that—I’d say, ‘You know, when you want, my check-book’s at your disposal.’ And it was, more times than I can remember.”

The colonel paused, smiling at his thoughts. The visitor, who had been looking idly on the ground, raised his eyes and let them dwell in curious scrutiny upon the old man’s profile, cut like a cameo against the dim walls with their fine gold traceries. John Gault, like all Californians, knew every vicissitude in the life of Adolphus Maroney, one of the great bonanza kings, a man whose career was quoted as an example of what could be done by brains and energy in the California of the Comstock era.

Wondering, as he had done many times before, what Viola thought of her father’s vainglorious imaginings, he turned now and suddenly looked at her. She was sitting with her elbow on the table and her chin resting in the palm of her hand. Her eyes were on the colonel, and her expression was one of appreciative interest. It was possible that she believed in him, absolutely and unquestionably. Yet her face, in its placid, restful gravity, gave no clue to the thoughts within. She was not to be read by every casual comer. Even the practised eye of the man of much worldly experience was baffled by the quiet reserve of this young girl who was nearly half his age.

“I haven’t seen Maroney for nearly eight or nine years,” continued the colonel. “The last time it was in the lobby of the Palace. He was with some capitalists from England, with a millionaire or two from New York thrown in. He saw me and looked uncomfortable, but he shook hands and introduced me. I got away as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to embarrass him.”

“Why should you embarrass him?” asked Viola.

The colonel looked at Gault, and gave the forbearing laugh of the man who treats with good-humored tolerance the ignorance of the woman.

“Why, he was always uneasy for fear I’d give away the fact that it was I who made his money for him. But, God bless my soul!” said the old man, throwing back his head and going off into a sonorous laugh, “he needn’t be afraid. I wouldn’t rob him of any of his glory. Only I took it pretty hard, when Mrs. Maroney was here last winter, that she didn’t go out of her way to be kind to you.”

Viola gave a little exclamation, Gault could not make out whether of annoyance or protest. That the colonel should have expected his daughter to be the object of Mrs. Maroney’s attention and patronage was only another evidence of his painful self-delusion. Mrs. Maroney was a lady who aspired to storm the fashionable citadels of New York and London, and troubled herself little with those of whom she could make no practical use in the campaign.

“You’re unjust to Mrs. Maroney,” Viola said gently, and rather weariedly, the visitor thought; “she was only here for two months, and she had quantities of friends to see and people to entertain.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” answered the old man, “that’s just your amiable way of looking at it. She was like her husband—she wanted to forget.”

He turned his eyes, still bright under their thick white brows, upon the younger man, and looking at him with an expression of mingled pride and patience, said:

“That is the way with the Californians. Once fall, and the procession passes you, and the men that were beside you don’t wait to turn and see where you dropped. You stay where you fall and you watch the others sweep on. That’s what I have done.”

“Don’t talk that way, father,” said Viola; “Mr. Gault will think you feel unhappy about it.”

The old man smiled, and leaning forward, clasped her hand and held it.

“Mr. Gault,” he said, with quite a grand air, “knows better than that. The opinions of other people don’t affect our happiness. I don’t resent the prosperity of my old mates, nor feel any discouragement at our present—er—temporary embarrassments.”

Viola stirred uneasily, and said quickly:

“No—no; of course not. Why should you?”

John Gault rose here, and she rose, too. Her embarrassment, which had vanished during the evening’s conversation, now returned, and she plucked nervously at the paper flower on the lamp-globe. It seemed to him that she was anxious for him to go.

With the colonel it was otherwise. Rising and standing upright in the patched limpness of his dressing-gown, he affected incredulity at the thought that his guest contemplated such an early departure. Then, being politely assured that this was unavoidable, and that, for the matter of that, it was now close upon eleven, he urged him to repeat the visit at an early date.

“We are always here, Viola and I,” he said. “We have not many engagements, as you see—just a friend here and there. But we value our friends more highly than the people do who count them by dozens.”

He had followed John Gault out into the hall, and from here his voice called:

“The lamp, Viola. Mr. Gault can’t put on his overcoat in the dark.”

She came out quickly, carrying the smaller of the two lamps, divested once more of its paper flower shade. To give a better light she held it up and looked at him, smiling a little from under the halo made by her hair. In answer to his good night she gave him her hand, which he pressed with a warm, strong grip.

As he went down the few steps from the porch the colonel stood in the doorway, his figure in sharp silhouette against the light within.

“Don’t be a month finding your way down here again,” he said. “People say it’s out of the beaten tracks, but we prefer it to any other locality in the city. Viola and I like the old associations, and I’ve struck my roots here too deep to have them pulled up. Well, good night! So long!”

The door closed, and as John Gault opened the gate, the light vanished from the two long panes of glass that edged it on both sides, and gleamed out through the cracks and crevices between the blinds of the bay-window.

It was a warm night, soft and still, and Gault decided to walk. With his head bent down he walked slowly, striking the cracks in the pavement with the tip of his cane. From small gardens still tended and watered in this unkempt wilderness of brick and stucco, whiffs of delicate fragrance drifted out across the pavements, only to be stifled by the sickly odors that rose from the open sewer-mouths.

When he turned into the wide avenues where the old mansions stood, the air was fresher and the silence heavier. Desertion and darkness seemed to claim as their own this relic of a life that had already passed away. The dim, bulky shapes of the great houses stood back from the street, sullen, black, and morose, like the visions in a dream. Vines shrouded their solemn forms, and here and there clung to the support of an iron balcony-rail, hanging down in the darkness like a veil that swayed and whispered in the breeze. In one porch a hall lamp was lit, and cast a pale and faltering light over an entrance that looked as full of menace and evil mystery as the opening to some bandit’s cavern.

But Gault passed their iron gates, high between supporting pillars, without looking up. A man’s dreams held him in a trance-like reverie. A man’s perplexities destroyed the content of many serenely selfish years. He had come to what seemed to him the fateful moment of his destiny. Had he been a younger man he would have said with a rush of reckless ecstasy, “I love her!” Now, walking slowly home under the solemn stars, he queried to himself:

“Shall I let myself love her? Do I dare?”

II

LETITIA’S surprise at the discovery that Colonel Reed had an unknown daughter was an unconscious compliment to the prominence and conspicuousness still enjoyed by that gentleman.

Hundreds of men who had made their fortunes in the great days of the Comstock, and lost them in the depression that followed, had daughters and sons that the friends of their prosperity neither knew nor cared about. The Californian is shy of all sad, unsuccessful things. Failures in the race in which so many won a prize were quickly forgotten, and crept away to hide their chagrin in distant quarters of the city or in the smaller towns. The procession had passed them by, and men who had been underlings when they were kings reigned in their stead. Even their names were no longer heard, and their children grew up separated by the chasm of poverty and obscurity from the children of their old mates.

That Colonel Reed had not been overlooked was partly accidental and partly owing to his inability to realize that such a state of affairs could be anything but a public misfortune. The colonel had the distinction of having collapsed in a most tremendous and complete manner, and he was proud of it. His case was quoted to inquiring tourist and ambitious native as a star example of money-getting and money-losing in the State of California. His passage from affluence to poverty was still a story worth telling and hearing. It was all in the superlative degree, for the colonel had never done anything by halves. His prosperity had been as extravagantly splendid as his adversity was characteristically complete.

He had made the bulk of his fortune in those years of the fat kine from 1870 to 1875. Before that he had been well-to-do, as every man could be in the San Francisco that developed between the days when “the water came up to Montgomery Street” and the inauguration of the Comstock boom. He had been a figure in the city from the earliest times, had known San Francisco when it was a straggling line of houses edging the muddy shores of the bay, with a trail winding through the chaparral over the dunes to the Mission Dolores. He had climbed the lupine-covered slopes of what is now California Street, and looked down on the hundreds of deserted ships that lay rotting in the cove. He had seen the city of tents swept by fire, and the city of wood follow it in a few months. He had been one of those who had held a ticket for the Jenny Lind Theater on the night it was burned down. He had witnessed the trial of Jansen’s assailants, and had served on the two great Vigilance Committees, and from the windows of Fort Gunnybags had seen Casey and Cora go to their last accounts.

Of his journey across the isthmus in ’49 he could tell thrilling stories. Only those of iron physique and reckless courage had the hardihood to accomplish the trip. The weak in health and feeble in spirit were left behind at the Chágres or turned back at Panama. The fittest survived to become those giants of the far West, the California pioneers. Of these the colonel had been a leading figure. Blood ran red in the veins in those days, and ginger was hot in the mouth. The present was too full and tumultuous to allow of even the briefest glimpse of the future. He became a part of the seething life of the city, felt its heart-beats as his own, lived greatly as it lived, loved, hated, sinned, and rejoiced with it.

He often said afterward that at this period of his life money was his last consideration. There was too much outside to make the question of sordid gain an engrossing one. The pecuniary side of things was never one that had bothered the colonel much. And, true to the old adage, Fortune knocked at the door of him who seemed most indifferent to her. His riches came suddenly. It was toward the seventies, when the Comstock was pouring its streams of wealth into hundreds of purses. The colonel held his open and it was filled. It was dazzling, wonderful, bewildering. His fortune rose by bounds that he could hardly follow. The figures of it seemed to grow overnight. In the wild exhilaration of the period he pressed his luck with unvarying success. He became intoxicated, the fever of money-getting seized him, and he believed equally in his star as a man of destiny and his genius as a financier.

Such a sudden and unexpected rise to opulence might have dazed another man, but the colonel rose to it like a race-horse to the spur. He was born with a natural instinct for luxury. Formerly he had been merely one of a thousand good fellows. Now he became a prince. Nothing was too whimsically extravagant for the pioneer who had crossed the isthmus in 1849. He could be traced by the trail of squandered money. He bought a country place near San Mateo, raised a palace on it, and entertained such celebrities as then drifted to California in a way that made them tell astonishing stories of the “Arabian Nights” existence of the bonanza kings. In the heyday of his prosperity he had married a young actress, who had enjoyed the splendors of her sudden elevation for three years, and had then died, leaving her husband but one legacy—a baby daughter.

Very shortly after her death the colonel’s fortunes began to decline. He put on a bold front and was more lavish in his expenditures than ever, for his belief in himself was unshakable. Then stories of his reverses got abroad, and people said the whole brief span of his glory had been a piece of pure and unmerited luck; as a financier he had no ability. The misfortune which attended all his later investments seemed to prove this assertion. His money melted like wax before fire. He bought largely of land about South Park and Rincon Hill when it was at its highest, refused to sell out, and saw the tide of popularity move to the other side of the city, leaving him overweighted with real estate upon which he could not pay the taxes. He mortgaged it to its full value, speculated with the money, and lost it. Ten years after his wife’s death he was ruined. Twenty years after saw him living in the house near South Park, the sole possession left him.

The colonel took his defeat bravely. He held his head as high as ever and accepted patronage from no man. When some one suggested that he should apply for aid to the Society of Pioneers he looked as haughtily amazed as though they had told him to stand and beg on the corner of Kearney and Sutter streets. Fate had forced him into the little house on the far side of town, but that was no reason why he should remain hidden there. Nearly every day he could be seen striding down Montgomery Street and mingling with the world of men where he had once been a leading figure. He seemed to feel no shame on the score of his old clothes turning green about the shoulders, and greeted his comrades, now lords of the street, with a cheery word and a wave of his hand to his hat-brim.

He always had a busy air as of the man of affairs. Men who did not know him well wondered what scheme he had on hand that caused him so much hurry and preoccupation. But there was no scheme. It was only the colonel’s way of defying destiny and satisfying the thirst and longing for the old excitement that carried him back to the scenes of his triumphs. He hung round Pine Street a good deal, telling those who would listen to him stories of the early days—of the men he had made, and of the women who had been the reigning beauties. Sometimes he was accorded an amused attention, for he could be excellent company when he chose, and many of his stories of the ups and downs of 1868 and 1870 had become classics.

There was just one subject upon which, in his Montgomery Street peregrinations, he preserved silence. This was his daughter. He said to himself, with a sudden squaring of his gaunt shoulders, that he only mentioned her to his intimates, and as his intimates existed mainly in his own imagination, Viola Reed’s name was almost unknown.

John Gault, who belonged to a later era of California’s prosperity than the colonel, had heard that there was such a person, but had never seen her. He did not fraternize with the old man, whom he regarded as a painful landmark in the city’s record of blighted hopes and ruined careers. Like many of his kind, he had an intense, selfish dislike for all that played upon his sympathies or moved him to an uncomfortable and discomposing pity.

One afternoon in the past winter he had gone across town to South Park to see some houses left him by his father, for which he had received a reasonable offer. On the way home, passing through one of the small cross-streets that connect the larger thoroughfares, he had encountered Colonel Reed and a lady. He would have passed them with the ordinary salutation, had not the lady, who had been gazing into the wayside gardens, turned her head as he approached and looked indifferently at him with what he thought were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.

He stopped and greeted the colonel with the polite friendliness to be expected of wayfarers who encounter one another in such distant localities. The colonel, who was always childishly flattered by the notice of well-known men, was expansive, and, after a few moments of casual talk, introduced the younger man to his daughter. Then they walked together to the old man’s house, which was some little distance away. The colonel, stopping at the gate, invited the stranger in. John Gault noticed that the girl did not second the invitation, and excused himself on the ground of pressing business. But the colonel, who had never got over the hospitable habits of his beaux jours, urged him to come some evening.

“Viola,” said the old man, smiling proudly on his daughter, “will be glad to see you, too. She’s the housewife—runs everything, myself included.”

Thus appealed to, she added her invitation to her father’s, and Gault said he would come.

As he walked away, he wondered if she wanted him to come. It had seemed to him as if she had spoken under pressure and reluctantly, though she had been perfectly polite. But it was impossible to tell what a woman thought, or when she was pleased or displeased, and the next week he went.

Three months had passed since then. The visit had been repeated many times, each time under almost exactly similar circumstances. Evening after evening Gault had listened to the colonel, wondering why he came, why he subjected himself to this absurd imposition, why he sat meek and generally mute under the conversational assaults of the garrulous old man. And yet, the day after his seventh visit, he sat in his private office wondering how soon he could go again to the little house near South Park without causing surprise to its inmates or breaking the rules of conventionality and deliberation that governed his life.

In the midst of his cogitations the door was opened by one of his clerks, who acquainted him with the fact that Colonel Reed was without and wanted to see him.

The announcement came upon him so unexpectedly that his color rose, and it was with an effort that he composed his face to greet the visitor. A disturbing presentiment of something unpleasant seized upon him. Never before had Colonel Reed entered or suggested entering his office. “What does the old man want?” he thought testily, as he bade the clerk show him in.

A moment later the colonel entered. He was suave and smiling. There was nothing of the broken financier, the ruined millionaire, in his buoyant and almost patronizing manner. His old black coat, faded and many years behind the mode, but well brushed and carefully mended, was buttoned up closely, and still sat upon his thin but sinewy figure with something of its old-time elegance. In one hand he carried a little black lacquer cane.

Sitting down opposite John Gault, where the light of the long window fell full upon his face, he had all the assurance of manner of a man whose bonanza has not become a memory and a dream.

“I was going by, and I thought I’d drop in and pass the time of day,” he said. “Things aren’t as lively with me just now as they have been. It’s an off season.”

“It’s that with most of us,” said the other, regarding him intently and wondering what he had come for.

“All in the same coffin, are we?” said the colonel, airily. “I’m generally on the full jump down here of a morning; but lately—”

He shrugged his shoulders and flung out his hands with a gesture of hopeless acquiescence in unmerited bad luck.

“You’re fortunate,” said Gault, “to have something to be on the full jump about. We find things pretty slow.”

“Oh, of course, in comparison with the past,” assented the old man. “Slow? Slow is not the word. Dead, my dear friend! San Francisco is a dead city—dead as Pompeii.”

“Well, not quite as bad as that,” said Gault, laughing in spite of himself.

“How should you be able to judge?” retorted the colonel. “You weren’t thought of when we old fellows were laying out the town. There was more life here in a minute then than there is now in a week. Then Portsmouth Square was the plaza and the center of the city, with a line of French boot-blacks along the lower side. We used to try our French on ’em every time we got a shine. And Lord! what smart fellows they were, and how much money they made!”

“So I’ve heard,” murmured Gault.

“And when I think of this street later on, this street alone, in, say, ’70—how it boiled and bubbled and sizzled with life! Those were the days to live in!”

“Undoubtedly,” acquiesced the listener. He was afraid the colonel had only come to continue the reminiscences on the historic ground of his early gains and losses, and he ran over in his mind the excuses he could use to politely and speedily get rid of the old man.

But the colonel, it appeared, had another end in view.

“I don’t find, however,” he continued, “that my full-jumping pays very well. I’ve got the energy and the savvy, but the luck isn’t with me. And I’m too old a Californian not to know there’s no good bucking against bad luck.”

He paused and tapped with the tip of his cane against the side of the desk, evidently expecting his companion to speak. This time, however, Gault vouchsafed no reply, but sat looking at him with a steady and somewhat frowning intentness.

The colonel continued, nothing abashed:

“I’ve run into bad luck belts before, but never as wide a one as this. It’s about the biggest I’ve struck yet, and I’ve had some experience. Not that it’s knocked me out,” he said, looking up and speaking with quick, genuine earnestness—“don’t imagine that.”

“Nothing is farther from my mind,” said Gault; for the old man’s look demanded an answer.

“For an old-timer like me, privations, misfortunes, poverty, don’t matter. We pioneers who came round the isthmus and across the plains aren’t afraid of a little more roughing it to finish up on. A day without dinner don’t frighten us, and we don’t put our fingers in our mouths and cry because we haven’t got sheets to our beds or fires in our stoves. But when you’ve women in your corral it’s different—especially women that haven’t always seen the rough side of things.”

“Of course it makes a difference,” the other said, to fill up the colonel’s second and more persistent pause.

“Well, that’s how it is with me. If it was only myself I’d not think twice of it. But I have to consider my daughter. It’s not the same with her. During her childhood she had every luxury, but lately I’ve not been able to give her all that I’d like to, though, of course, she’s never really suffered. And just now my affairs are in such a devil of a tangle that—well, I was going to ask you if you could oblige me with a temporary loan—just a trifle to tide us over this spell of bad weather—say fifty dollars.”

The colonel looked into the younger man’s face quite unembarrassed, his old countenance still preserving its expression of debonair self-satisfaction. The money in his hand, he gave it a slight clink, and then dropped it into a worn leather purse with a clasp that snapped, and said gaily:

“This is the best medicine for low spirits. Not that mine are low—no, sir; it takes more than a temporary shortness of funds to knock out a pioneer of ’49. Whether it’s champagne or beer or water, there’s no difference when it comes to quenching your thirst, and at my age that’s all you want to drink for.”

“You’re a better philosopher than most of the pioneers,” said Gault, feeling the embarrassment that the old man seemed so complacently free from.

“Philosopher!” said the other, rising. “Why, my dear boy, I could found a school of philosophy—only where would the pupils come from? No, no; philosophy wouldn’t pay in California; too much blue sky and sunshine here. Well, when are we going to see you again? Soon—don’t forget that. Viola and I haven’t many friends—just an odd one, like yourself, here and there. Viola doesn’t go much on society, and so we let the old crowd drop; and we’re not sorry, not sorry—too many tares in the wheat. What old Solomon said about a dinner of herbs and good company being better than a stalled ox in a wide house with a brawling woman—wasn’t that it?—was right. He was a great old chap, Solomon! Brains and experience—that’s a combination that’s hard to beat.”

They moved toward the door together, and here the colonel turned on his friend for a last good-by.

“Well, so long,” he said, extending his hand and smiling on the younger man with a bland benignity of aspect that had in it something paternally patronizing. “Don’t forget that we expect you soon. We’re always at home in the evenings, and always glad to see our friends—our real friends.”

When he had gone, Gault went to the window of the outer office and stood there watching him. The faded old hat, shadowing the fringe of white hair, towered over the heads of the hurrying men who passed in two streams up and down the street.

Gault stood gazing till the tall figure passed out of sight. When he turned back from the window his clerks noticed that he looked moodily preoccupied.

Five days after this the colonel appeared again. He was urbane, affable, and easy as an old shoe, and, with the air of a king honoring a faithful servant, borrowed thirty dollars more.

This was on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon Gault, who had passed a restless night, resolved to escape from the irritation of his own thoughts and seek amusement in the society of Letitia. For this purpose he took an early lunch at his club, and by two o’clock was wending his way up the sunlit streets that run between large houses and blooming gardens through what is known as the Western Addition.

For the past six years it had been an open secret in that small family circle that Mortimer Gault and his wife wished to make a marriage between John and Letitia. Certainly it was a neat combination of the family relationships and properties that might have suggested itself to any one. The ambition had originated with Maud Gault, who, like most managing, clever women, was a match-maker, and who, with her social successes and pecuniary ambitions, would naturally select as the husband of her only sister this rich, agreeable, and presentable gentleman who was so constantly in their society, and who stood upon that footing of a semi-romantic intimacy which distant relationship gives. But it was difficult to force the two objects of this matrimonial plot into sentimental relations. Letitia was reserved upon the subject of her own feelings. Mrs. Gault, who was not reserved upon any subject except her age, could get nothing out of the girl, either as to what she herself felt for John or as to what she thought he felt for her. Sometimes Letitia laughed a little when the persistent questions of her sister were hard to avoid; sometimes she blushed; and once or twice she had grown angry and rebelled against this intrusive catechizing. It was difficult even for so keen a woman as Maud Gault to read the girl’s heart.

John Gault, who was sincerely fond of Letitia, in a steady-going, brotherly way, watched the manœuvers of his sister-in-law with a good deal of inward amusement. He was confident that Letitia entertained the same sort of regard for him that he did for her, and he took an honest and simple pleasure in the frank good-fellowship that existed between them. Now and then, it is true, he had vaguely thought of the young girl as his wife, and had wondered, in an idle way, whether he could win her affection. He thought that no man could ever find a better wife than she would make. But these were aimless speculations, and no one knew of them. Even Maud Gault sometimes felt discouraged—he was so exasperatingly pleased when she told him of Letitia’s admirers!

Though it was so early, Gault found one of these rivals already before him. Tod McCormick, the only son of Jerry McCormick, who had been “made” by Colonel Reed, was sitting with Letitia in the drawing-room, to which the umbrella-plants and palms gave an overheated and tropical appearance. The sunlight poured into the room, and, shining through the green of all this juicy and outspreading foliage over the lustrous silks on piled-up cushions and upholstered chairs, gave an impression of radiance and color even more brilliant than that imparted by the lamplight.

In the midst of the rainbow brightness Letitia sat among the cushions. She was very upright, for she was not of the long, lithe order of women who lounge gracefully, but in her tight-drawn silks and pendulating laces she found her habitual attitude of square-shouldered erectness more comfortable.

Her guest, who rose to meet the newcomer, looked as if he must be a changeling in the blooming and lusty brood of Jerry McCormick. While his sisters were women of that richness of coloring and contour peculiar to California, Tod was not five feet and a half high, and was thin, meager, sallow-skinned, and weak-eyed. A thatch of lifeless hair covered his narrow head, and a small and sickly mustache had been coaxed into existence on his upper lip. He was in reality twenty-seven years old, but he looked hardly twenty. Even his clothes, of the most fashionable make and texture, could not impart to him an air of elegance or style. Their very splendor seemed to heighten his insignificance.

“Howdy, Gault,” he said, his small and weazened countenance lightened by a fleeting and evidently perfunctory smile. “You’re early, but I’m earlier.”

“I came to see my brother,” said the older man, rather stiffly, for though he knew Tod to be good-natured and harmless, he did not like him.

“What a pity!” said Letitia. “Maud and Mortimer are both out. They’re lunching at the Murrays’. But they’ll be back soon now. Won’t you sit here with us?”

Though Tod’s annoyance at this proposition did not find vent in words, it was plain to be seen in the dejected and sullen expression that settled on his face. With his hands in his pockets, he stood looking down on his feet in pointed patent-leather shoes, balancing absently on his toes and heels.

“No, thanks,” said Gault, whose dislike of the young man did not go far enough to blight his afternoon. “I’ll go into the library. I’ve got some letters to read over and answer, and I’ll do it now, while I am waiting.”

He turned away and passed through the wide hall-space to the library, a room at the back of the house, where two large windows commanded a view of the Golden Gate and the bay. He had picked up a magazine from a table in the hall, and now, seating himself, prepared to look at it. But he presently threw it aside, and abandoned himself to a dreamy survey of the view.

The magnificent panorama of hills and water lay still and enormous under the afternoon sun. It was not late enough for the summer’s drought to have burned the hills, and the nearer ones were a faint, mellow green. Their hollows were filled with clear, amethyst shadows, and the sea lay at their bases, motionless and level like a blue floor. The extraordinary vividness which marks the Californian landscape was softened by the almost imperceptible haze which overlay the scene. The watcher clasped his hands behind his head, and looked with troubled eyes at this splendid prospect. From the room beyond came the murmur of conversation, every now and then interrupted by the high, cackling laugh of Tod McCormick. Presently there was a break in the voices, they grew louder and decreased, the hall door banged, and Letitia came rustling into the room.

“It’s too bad Maud and Mortimer are not back yet,” she said. “You’ll have to talk to me.”

Gault yawned, flung out his arms in a stretch, and looked at her smiling.

“I told a little story in there. It was out of consideration for the feelings of your young man. I didn’t come to see Mortimer. I came to see you.”

There was no denying the fact that Letitia looked pleased. She tried to hide her satisfaction under an air of curiosity.

“What did you come to see me for?” she asked.

“To take a walk. It’s too fine to stay indoors talking to Tod McCormick. Go up-stairs and put on your hat, and let’s take a pasear.”

Letitia needed no urging. She rarely went out alone with Gault, and the prospect of a walk in his society was very attractive.

She was absent some time. When she reappeared the cause of her delay was evident. She had changed her dress, and now, in a checked silk of black and white, and trimmed with a wonderful arrangement of black gauze and ribbon, she looked her best. A large black hat with a brim shaded the upper part of her face. In the back it was trimmed with some green flowers which made a delightful harmony with her copper-colored hair. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and as she entered the room, conscious, perhaps, of her beauty and her vanity in thus decking it, her eyes sought his, asking for admiration.

Unfortunately he was not looking at her, but was turning over the pages in the magazine he had formerly discarded.

“Are you ready?” he said, without looking up, but hearing from the rustle of her dress that she was beside him. “I thought you were never coming.”

Outside the house, they turned to the right and walked slowly up the avenue, conversing with the desultory indifference of old friends. In the bright afternoon sunlight the broad street stretched before them, almost deserted in its Sunday calm. On either side the gardens blazed with color, enameled with blooms of an astonishing richness of tint. Over the tops of fences nasturtiums poured blossoms that danced in the air like tongues of fire. Scarlet geraniums, topping long stalks, clothed with a royal robe the summit of hedges. Against sunny stretches of wall, heliotrope broke in a purple foam. Climbing roses hung in heavy clusters from vines that were drooping under the weight of such a prodigal over-production. The wide, sumptuous flowers of the purple clematis clung round the balcony posts, completely concealing the dry, thread-like vine that gave them birth.

Between the houses, each one detached in its own square of ground, with that suggestion of space which is peculiar to San Francisco, glimpses of the bay came and went—bits of the gaunt hills, lengths of turquoise sea touched here and there with a patch of white sail, and sudden views of Alcatraz queening it alone on its red-brown rock.

Letitia and Gault walked on, now and then according the customary phrase to the beauty of the landscape. Letitia, who was not an admirer of nature, was much more interested in the occasional couples they met, smart and smiling in their Sunday attire; but, with the complaisance of her amiable spirit, she was always quick to echo her companion’s enthusiasm. Presently, after walking in silence for a few minutes, he asked her:

“How would you like to earn your own living, Letitia?”

This was rather an unexpected problem to solve, but Letitia had no doubts on the subject, and answered promptly:

“I wouldn’t like it at all.”

“But there are lots of women who have to—women like you, who have had everything they wanted, and been well taken care of, and then their parents—relations—guardians lose their money, and they have to work.”

“I think it would be better for them to marry,” said Letitia, sagely. “It’s much better for a woman to marry, and have some one to take care of her, than to have to take care of herself.”

“Well, suppose she doesn’t want to marry, or doesn’t want to marry the kind of man that asks her, isn’t it better for her to work for her living? Wouldn’t a proud, self-respecting woman rather work for her living than—than—than not? You see, Letitia,” he said, turning to her with a smile, “how much I think of your opinion.”

“Of course, any woman would rather work than go without things. She’d have to. Why do you want my opinion? Whom do you know that has to work for her living?”

“Oh, no one in especial,” he said, with a careless shrug. “It was just a supposititious case. I was reading a novel about something like that, and I thought I’d get your opinion as an intelligent, modern, up-to-date young person.” He looked at her again with his indulgent and somewhat quizzical smile. “Aren’t you all that, Tishy?” he asked, using the family diminutive of her name.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “whether I’m all that. I may be some of it. But it’s so awfully hard for a woman to support herself. They have such a hard time, and get so badly paid, and there are so few things that you make money by soon, you know, without studying for years.”

“Why, it seems to me there are lots of things: dressmaking, and type-writing, and—er—trimming hats, and making jam, and reciting poems, and teaching children.”

Letitia laughed.

“Why, how could a girl type-write, or trim hats, or even make jam, without knowing how? You’ve got to learn those things. I’ve tried to trim hats a dozen times, and always spoiled them; and one summer Maud undertook to make some jam, and it was perfectly awful—I don’t mean the jam: I mean the house while the jam was getting made. Maud and the Chinaman and Mortimer were all in such a bad temper!”

They walked on for a few moments in silence. Then Letitia continued:

“Why, even the girls who have fairly good positions in stores don’t get enough to live on. The girl who shampoos my hair has a sister in Abram’s, and she gets seven dollars a week, and has to be nicely dressed. Just fancy that!” said Letitia; and then, in a burst of candor: “Why, I never in this world could dress on that alone, even if I gave up silk stockings and always wore alpaca petticoats like the woman who teaches Maud German.”

“Nevertheless,” said Gault, “it seems to me that a woman who was high-minded and proud and independent would be a shop-girl and live on seven dollars a week rather than—”

He stopped. Letitia looked at him interestedly, struck by something in his tone.

“Rather than what?” she asked.

“Rather than—well, in this story the people who were so poor had friends that were well off, and all that sort of thing, and they borrowed from them, and—I think it’s going to turn out that they lived that way.”

“Did the girl borrow? Wouldn’t work and lived on the borrowed money? Oh, that’s—!”

Letitia raised both hands in the air and let them drop with a gesture that expressed complete finality of interest and approval.

“What do you mean by ‘oh,’ Letitia?” he said, rather sharply. “I never said the girl knew anything about it.”

“Well, she must have had some curiosity to know where the money came from. When her father or mother came in and said, ‘Here’s ten dollars to pay the butcher, and here’s twenty dollars to pay the grocer,’ don’t you suppose she wanted to know where it came from? Really, John, considering you’re supposed to be so clever, you don’t know much about women.”

He made no answer, and she went on:

“Of course she knew all about it. She would have been an idiot if she hadn’t. And she doesn’t sound at all like an idiot. It’s just the other way. She was clever—altogether too clever. I don’t like that kind of person at all. I wouldn’t trust her from here to the corner. She must have been one of those soft, clinging, gentle creatures who are always turning aside to hide their tears. Was she?”

“I dare say. You seem to know more about her than I do.”

“But it sounds very interesting,” said Letitia, coming closer to him. “I’d like to read it. What is the name of the book?”

“Oh, I don’t remember. It’s nonsense, anyway—some stuff not worth talking about.”

Letitia continued to look at him silently for a moment; then she said slowly:

“It’s not a book at all. It’s a real person. You’ve been trying to make a fool of me.”

He looked at her quickly, his eyes, behind the shield of his glasses, narrowed to mere lines. For a moment, as their cold gleam met hers, she shrank, for she thought he was angry, and, like other people, Letitia was afraid of John Gault’s anger. Then he smiled at her, and said:

“If you ever have to earn your living, Tishy, there’ll be no trouble about your vocation. You’d make a fortune as a female detective. I never saw such wonderful ability. Why, Sherlock Holmes isn’t in it with you.”

“You can laugh as much as you like,” said Letitia, flushing under his sarcasms, “but I know I’m right.”

“What!” he said, coming to a standstill, and staring into her face with a frown of exaggerated intensity, “you actually don’t believe me?”

“No, I don’t,” she retorted, doggedly combative.

“After all these years, has my noble example of truth and probity made no deeper impression on you? Oh, Letitia, I couldn’t have believed it of you!”

“I don’t care what you say,” she repeated, “or how you try to turn it off. It’s a real person, and I’m certain she’s simply horrid. And if you take my advice, the less you have to do with her the better.”

This was apparently too much for the sobriety of John Gault. In the loneliness of the street his laughter resounded deep and loud. Letitia looked at him with moody disfavor as he stood, his face flushed, his eyes suffused with moisture, and fairly roared. Letitia’s eyes were threatened with a moisture of a different kind.

“Oh, dear Tishy,” he said, when his paroxysm was over, taking one of her hands and holding it tightly, “what a sage you are! How good of you to warn me! With you to take care of me, I ought never to come to any harm.”

“I guess you never would,” said Letitia, with a little sigh. “Certainly I know enough to know that that woman is not a good person to trust—or even to know,” added the mentor, with an accent of warning, and staring at him with large, cautioning eyes from under her hat-brim.

Her companion was threatened with another outburst.

“Oh, Letitia, don’t be so funny,” he said. “I haven’t laughed as much as this for a month.”

He took her hand and, drawing it inside his arm, pressed it against his heart; then, looking down at her with eyes still full of laughter, but touched with tenderness, he said:

“To think of Letitia Mason taking the trouble to give me good advice!”

Letitia was mollified, less by his words than by his manner, which had in it that kindly camaraderie which made her feel happy and at ease. She withdrew her hand, laughing, and said, with a sort of shyness that was very charming:

“I’ll always give you good advice, if you’ll promise not to laugh at me.”

Then they walked on, talking of other things, until the girl’s spirits were restored to their normal attitude of a sedate, candid cheeriness. She grew quite talkative, discoursing to him of various small happenings in the house, and not noticing, in her recovered good humor, that his answers were short and his manner grave and distrait.

As they retraced their steps the broad, yellow glow of the sunset deepened behind them, and before them burned on the windows of houses that climbed the hillsides still farther on. The water and its low-lying shores—flat lands where silver creeks lay embedded like the metal wires in cloisonné ware—were already veiled in a soft, purplish twilight which exhaled a creeping chilliness. At a high point, unobstructed by buildings, they turned to watch the sun drop into the sea. For a moment it seemed to hesitate, resting on the horizon like a spinning copper disk; then it slipped out of sight, and the darkness rushed up from unexpected places and swept over the prospect, blotting out all distinctions of color. Only in the west there was a great gold radiance, against which little red clouds floated like bits of raveled silk.

John Gault, as was his Sunday custom, dined with his brother’s family. After dinner he left early, before the usual callers appeared—generally young men come to bow the knee at Letitia’s shrine.

For a space he walked down the street with a quick, decided step. Then, of a sudden, he stopped, and stood looking at the pavement, uncertain and irresolute. The car which had borne him to the other side of town on the last evening that he had dined with the Mortimer Gaults glided across the avenue some blocks farther down. He heard its bell and saw the long funnel of light from its lantern pierce the darkness before it.

He stood for a moment watching it, then turned in the opposite direction and stopped. As he hesitated, he heard in the distance the bell of the next car. With a smothered ejaculation, he wheeled about and ran for it. He caught the car and swung himself to a front seat.

“Kismet!” he said to himself, as he sank down panting.

III

AT this period of his history the colonel’s exchequer must have been in a particularly depleted condition, for it was not a week after John Gault’s visit that he again appeared at the office, and this time requested a loan of forty dollars.

Had the colonel, during this interview, exhibited some of that shamefaced and conscious embarrassment that the most hardened borrowers will show, his benefactor would have felt less miserably ill at ease. But the old man was as suave and affably benignant as if he were conferring a long-solicited favor. That there was something of shame in his barefaced assaults upon the purse of his daughter’s friend seemed an idea that had never entered his mind. No disconcerting scruples marred his appreciation of his sudden good fortune. Pride was evidently a possession of which he was as poorly supplied as he was with the tangible goods of this world.

He was in the best of spirits; indeed, to John Gault’s suspicious eye he had the triumphant air of a man who had found a good thing. He came into the office with a jaunty tread and an alert, all-embracing glance, and left it showering smiles and bows on its chief and his clerks. The sun of his prosperity seemed to have warmed and brightened him in every way. He told inimitable stories of the early days, which—unhampered by the presence of his daughter—were less egotistical, and not always so conventional, as those he regaled Gault with at home. He was as pressing as ever in his invitations to call, and into these introduced Viola’s name as being a participator with himself in the desire of seeing their mutual friend as often as his time and inclination would lead him to the house near South Park.

After this visit the vague irritation and moodiness that Gault had felt gave place to a poignant sense of uncertainty and doubt. Naturally of a suspicious nature, the life he had led, the surroundings in which he had passed from youth to maturity, the large experience of evil gained in a twenty years’ residence in a thoroughly loose and lawless city, had intensified his original tendency till he was now prone to suspect where suspicion was either a folly or an insult. He had the vain man’s dread of being fooled, imposed upon, made ridiculous, and he was proud of his keenness in detecting such intentions.

At twenty-two he had come from Harvard to San Francisco, had plunged into the fashionable life of the day, and being the son of wealthy and well-known parents, had quickly learned the bitter lessons which society teaches its followers. People said John Gault had never married because he believed in no woman. This was an aspersion upon his sound, if narrow, common sense. He was afraid of marriage, of a terrible disillusionment, followed by a life-time of conventionally correct misery. What he feared in it was himself. He dreaded that he might not make the woman he married happy, and deep in his soul he cherished the same dream as Balzac, who once wrote: “To devote myself to the happiness of a woman has been my ceaseless dream, and I suffer because I have not realized it.” With the passage of the years he had grown narrower and more ambitionless. When he met Viola Reed he was sinking into the dull apathy of a self-engrossed and purposeless middle age.

Her attraction for him was sudden and compelling. He often wondered why he liked her so much. He had known hundreds of women who were prettier and quite as clever. About Viola there was a curious, distinguishing touch of refinement that he did not find in many of the beauties and belles who were so ready to smile on him at the fortnightly cotillions and subscription germans. The delicate modesty of her beauty satisfied his exacting eye. There was something subtle and rare about her, a suggestion of romance in her wide, pondering eyes, a charm of mystery behind the face that looked so youthful and yet was so femininely secretive. She always seemed to say the right thing, and that and the soft tones of her voice were keenly pleasing to his fastidious taste.

At first he had merely sought her society for the passing pleasure he had derived from it. He was reaching that stage of life when he found it difficult to be interested in new people, and where the long tedium of a dinner next a handsome and pretentious partner was beginning to assume the aspect of a martyrdom. There was nothing irksome or commonplace or tedious in the evenings spent in the house near South Park; even the colonel ceased to be a bore when his daughter sat by listening. Gault began to like going there better than going anywhere else. On the days when he decided that he would spend the evening at the Reeds’, he found himself looking forward to the visit all the afternoon. The anticipation of it lay like a glad thought at the bottom of his heart. On the night that Letitia had asked him about Colonel Reed’s daughter, he had nearly arrived at a conclusion—that Viola Reed was the one woman in the world for him.

Nearly, but not quite. The next day Colonel Reed had come and borrowed the first fifty dollars.

This simple action had disturbed John Gault’s serenity. The second and third visits tore the fabric of his dream to pieces. If the old man had only made his request once, he would have thought no more of it than of the numberless other loans which he had contributed to the human wreckage left by the receding tides of San Francisco’s several booms. But the colonel’s subsequent appearances, so closely following on Gault’s visits, awoke a sudden swarm of suspicions that began buzzing their importunate warnings into his ears. Why had the old man been so effusive in the beginning? Why had he invited him, insisted even, upon his calling? Was he so determinedly hospitable merely to secure a listener to his reminiscences? And if he had acted upon his own impulses at first,—which certainly seemed the case,—Viola could have stopped him later on. Gault had noticed that her word seemed law to her father.

In the pain of his doubts he surreptitiously made inquiries, and discovered that Colonel Reed’s penury was of the past five years’ duration. Up to that time he had still held small properties and realized on them at intervals. People who knew said that since then his circumstances had been desperate, and yet it was known of all men that he was engaged in no paid employment. It was the one point upon which the pride of the erstwhile millionaire was firm. Viola did no work, either. In the West, the woman laboring to help sustain the ruined fortunes of her family is so common a spectacle that the strong man, secure in his riches and his health, felt a species of fierce indignation against the girl for her seeming idleness.

Yet it must take so little to keep them. They owned the house they lived in, and employed no servant, Viola doing all the work of the small menage. He had tried to persuade himself that the colonel was using him for his banker without the girl’s knowledge, and then Letitia, with her heavy feminine common sense, had laid her finger on the weak spot in that argument. How could a sudden influx of money enter into so small a household without the cognizance of the person who managed it all? It was nonsensical to think of. She knew—and if she knew, was she not party to the whole sordid, ugly plot?

But here he always stopped. It was impossible. It could not be. The image of her face rose before him, as it often did now, making him feel disgusted and ashamed that even in thought he should have done her an injury. There was a mistake somewhere. It would explain itself. But he knew that until it did explain itself he would know no peace; for he could not live without seeing her, and at every visit he felt her charm penetrate deeper into his heart, despite his lurking doubts.

He spent hours in pondering as to the best way to silence these doubts without letting her suspect their existence. Even if she were cognizant of it, he could hardly speak to her of her father’s borrowing. Yet in his thought she always seemed so simple, so girlish, so young, that he was sure if he could see her alone, and perhaps turn the conversation upon some analogous subject, her ignorance would speak from every feature. He had grown to know all the varying expressions of her face, and he felt that he could detect the slightest change of color or tremor of consciousness on its pale innocence.

He did not, however, know at what hour he was likely to find her by herself. He had always gone in the evening, as it was the colonel who asked him, and who invariably designated that time. Gault fancied that his visits were the old man’s chief amusement and recreation, and that he so particularly insisted upon the evening in the desire not to miss them. Upon this hypothesis he concluded that he ran a better chance of finding Viola alone in the second half of the day, and on his first disengaged afternoon he left his office early, with the intention of walking across town to South Park.

It was not late enough in the season for the summer winds to have begun, and the straw, dust, paper, and general refuse that they sweep away with their steady, cold breath lay thick on the pavements. In the hard light of afternoon the dreary quarter looked even meaner and more squalid than it did by night. The wayfarer could see the dirt on the little shop-windows, the dinginess of the wares displayed. The small, open stands, where shell-fish and oyster cocktails were sold, were thick with flies. Behind the grimed glass of the pawnbroker’s windows lay the relics of vanished days of splendor and extravagance. Old-fashioned pieces of jewelry, broken ornaments, rusted pistols, gold-mounted spectacles, mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, were heaped together in neglected disorder. Now and then the entrance of a second-hand clothes store gave a glimpse of a dark interior hung with clothes, between which the sharp Jewish faces of the patron and his wife peered out eagerly.

John Gault’s eyes passed over this with slow disgust. What might not the constant sight of such naked poverty breed in the most sensitive soul! Day after day Viola must have passed this way, must have seen the human spiders waiting in their dark web, perhaps might have chaffered with them, or recognized her own jewelry among the tarnished relics in the pawnbroker’s window.

He turned into the wider avenue, where gentility had once dwelt in its bulky palaces. They seemed to stare with wide, unshuttered windows, drearily speculating on the desolation of the street and their own decay. Around them gardens stretched unkempt and parched, here and there an aloe or some vigorously growing shrub striking a note of color in the uniform grayness. High iron gates, richly wrought, but eaten into by rust, hung open from broken hinges, or were tied together with ravelings of rope. One of the most imposing, still standing upright, was held ajar with a piece of broken brick. It gave entrance to a circular sweep of driveway and a large garden full of rankly growing shrubs and vines and headless statues, with a rusty fountain-basin in the center, and urns still showing the corpses of geraniums. Inside Gault saw some of the children of the neighborhood playing games, and realized that the broken brick was evidently of their introduction. This was the house which had been built by Jerry McCormick thirty-odd years before. It had the appearance of having been deserted for a century.

A few turns down narrower streets brought the wayfarer to the Reeds’ home. He had only seen it once before by daylight, and now eyed it with curiosity. Though age and poverty showed in its peeling stucco walls, in the untended vines that hung about the bay-window, in the rotting woodwork of the old gate, it still had the air of a place that is lived in and cared for. Inside the gate the pathway of black-and-white marble was clean and bright. Round the root of the dracæna there was a flower-bed planted with mignonette. On the other side of the flagged walk fuchsias and heliotrope were trained against the high fence which separated the house from its next-door neighbor.

In answer to his ring Viola opened the door. She was dressed in a blue-and-white gingham dress, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbows, and showed arms slightly rounded and white as milk. She wore an apron and had a pair of scissors in her hand. When she saw who it was the color of joy ran in a beautiful flush over her face.

“You never came at this time before,” she said in the hall, hastily pulling down her sleeves. “I never thought for a moment it was you, or I shouldn’t have come to the door with my sleeves this way.”

Then they passed into the drawing-room. The afternoon light streamed through the bare emptiness of this once stately apartment, revealing the long crack that zigzagged across the mirror, and the rents in the colonel’s arm-chair. In the rear half of the room there were only one or two pieces of furniture, evidently seldom used, and pushed back into the corners. The double doors leading from here were open, and vouchsafed the visitor a view of one of those long and spacious dining-rooms, with an outer wall of glass, often seen in old San Francisco houses. Fronting this glass wall were tiers of plants, some mounted on rough boxes, some on tables. They were of many sizes and sorts, but the feathery foliage of the maidenhair was most in evidence. It seemed to be growing in every kind of receptacle, from the ordinary flower-pot to a tomato-can on one side and a huge kerosene-oil tin on the other. Near the dining-table was a chair, and the table itself was littered with brown paper, cut neatly into circular pieces about three inches in diameter.

Viola moved forward to close the doors, but was arrested by her visitor.

“Why, you’ve a regular conservatory in there. What beautiful plants!”

She held the door open and let him look in, though apparently not quite at her ease.

“Yes,” she said; “I have great luck with ferns. Some people have, you know. It’s just because we take more care of them than others.”

“My sister-in-law would die of envy if she could see those,” said Gault, indicating the maidenhairs; “she’s always buying that sort of thing, and they’re always dying.”

Viola looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. The color deepened in her cheeks, and then she looked away and began to play with the lock of the door.

“She must buy a great many,” she said, with a questioning inflection.

“Cart-loads,” said he, absently, wondering what had caused her augmented color, and watching her as he would always now watch her whenever there was the slightest deviation from her normal manner.

“And I suppose,” she said, “she spends a great deal on them?”

“I suppose so,” he answered, “judging by the number that I’ve seen wither in their prime and disappear, and new ones take their places the next day.”

Viola pressed the lock in and shot it out.

“Are any of them dead just now?” she asked, in rather a small voice.

“Dozens, probably. It seems to me some of them are always dead, only they’re considerate enough not to all die at the same time.”