Three days before the events in the last chapter a man entered its office and asked for rooms. He was an impressive person, of the kind who usually went to the Palace or the St. Francis. Ned Murphy, the clerk, sized him up as an Easterner or maybe a foreigner. There was something foreign-looking about him—you couldn't just tell what; it might be the way he wore his hair, brushed back straight from his forehead, or an undemocratic haughtiness of bearing. He looked as if he was used to the best, and he acted that way; had to be shown four suites before he was satisfied and then took the most expensive, second floor front, two rooms and bath, and you could see he didn't think much of it. Ned Murphy lived up to him with an unbroken spirit, languidly whistled as he slid the register across the counter, looked up the hall with a bored air, and then winked at the bell boy holding the bags. But when the stranger had followed the boy up the stairs—the Argonaut had no elevator—he pulled the register round and eagerly read the entry—"Boye Mayer, New York." A foreign name all right; you couldn't fool him.

He told the switchboard girl, who had been taking it all in from her desk, and she slid over to size up the signature. She thought he mightn't be foreign—just happened to have that sort of name—he didn't talk with any dialect. When the bell boy came back they questioned him, but he was grouchy—feller'd only given him a dime. And say, one of them suit cases was all battered and wore out, looked like the kind the hayseeds have when they come up from the country.

In his room the man went to the window, hitched back the lace curtains and threw up the sash. Life in the open had made these shut-in places stifling, and he drew in the air with a deep relish. Evening was falling, a belated fog drifting in, wreathing in soft whorls over the hills, feeling its way across their summits and through their hollows. It made the prospect depressing, everything enveloped in a universal, dense whiteness. He surveyed it, frowning—the looming shapes of the high land beyond, the line of one-story hovels sprawled on the gore. To the right the street slanted upward toward Telegraph Hill whence smaller streets would decline to the waterfront and the Barbary Coast. He knew that section well and smiled a little as he thought of it and of himself, a ragged vagrant, exploring its byways.

His thoughts stopped at that memory—the lowest point of his fall—hung there contemplative and then turned backward. They passed beyond his arrival in California, his days of decay before that, the first gradual disintegration, back over it all to the beginning.

Thirty-six years ago he had been born in New York, a few months after the arrival of his parents. They were Austrians, his father an officer in the Royal Hungarian Guards, his mother a dancer at the Grand Opera House in Vienna. When Captain Ruppert Heyderich, of a prosperous Viennese family, had, in a burst of passionate chivalry, married Kathi Mayer, end coryphee on the second row, he had deserted the army, his country and his world and fled to America. Captain Heyderich had not committed so radical a breach of honor and convention without something to do it on, and the early part of the romance had moved smoothly in a fitting environment. Their only child, Lothar, could distinctly recall days of affluence in an apartment on the Park. He had had a governess, he had worn velvet and furs.

Then a change came; the governess disappeared, also the velvet and furs, and they began moving. There was a period when to move was a feature of their existence, each habitat showing a decrease in size and splendor. Lothar was nine, a lanky boy with his hair worn en brosse, in baggy knickerbockers and turn-over white collars, when they were up on the West Side in six half-lighted rooms, with a sloppy Hungarian servant to do all the work. That was the time when his father taught languages and his mother dancing. But he went to a private school. Captain Heyderich never got over his European ideas.

Those lean years came to a sudden end; Captain Heyderich's mother died in Vienna and left him a snug little fortune. They moved once more, but this time it was a hopeful, jubilant move, also a long one—to Paris. They settled there blithely in an apartment on the Rue Victor Hugo, Lothar, placed at a Lycee, coming home for weekends. He remembered the apartment as ornate and over-furnished, voluble guests coming and going, a great many parties, his mother, elaborately dressed, always hurrying off to meet people in somebody's else house or hurrying home to meet them in her own. Several times Austrian relations visited them, and Lothar had a lively recollection of a fight one Sunday evening, when an uncle, a large, bearded man, had accused his mother of extravagance and she had flown into a temper and made a humiliating scene.

He was seventeen when his father died, and it was discovered that very little money was left. Some of the relations came from Vienna and there was a family conclave at which it was suggested to Lothar that he return to Vienna with them and become a member of the clan. Separation from his mother was a condition and he refused. He did this not so much from love of her as from fear of them. They represented a world of which he was already shy, of high standards, duties rigorously performed, pledges to thrift and labor. Life with Kathi was more to his taste. He loved its easy irresponsibility, its lack of routine, its recognition of amusement as a prime necessity. He delivered his dictum, his mother wept triumphant tears, and the relations departed washing their hands of him.

After that they went to London and Lothar made his first attempts at work. They were fitful; the grind of it irked him, the regular hours wore him to an ugly fretfulness. He tried journalism—could have made his place for he was clever—but was too unreliable, and dropped to a space writer, drifting from office to office. In his idle hours, which were many, he gambled. That was more to his taste, done in his own way, at his own time—no cramping restrictions to bind and stifle him. He was often lucky and developed a passion for it.

He was twenty-three when they returned to New York, Kathi having begged some more money from Vienna. She was already a worn, old witch of a woman, dressed gayly in remnants of past grandeur and always painting her face. She and her son held together in a partnership strained and rasping, but unbreakable, united by the mysterious tie of blood and a deep-rooted moral resemblance. They led a wandering life, following races, hanging on the fringes of migrating fashion, sometimes hiding from creditors, then reestablished by a fortunate coup. But in those days he was still careful to pick his steps along the edges of the law, just didn't go over though it was perilous balancing. When she died he was relieved and yet he grieved for her. He felt free, no longer subject to her complaints and bickerings, but in that freedom there was a chill, empty loneliness—no one was beside him in that gingerly picking of his steps.

It was when he was twenty-seven—not quite lost—that the news came from Vienna of an unexpected legacy. His uncle, dying at the summit of a successful career, had relented and left him fifty thousand dollars. He assured himself he would be careful—poverty had taught him—and at first he tried. But the habits of "the years that the locust had eaten" were too strong. Augmented by several successful speculations it lasted him for six years. At the end of that time he was ruined, worn in body, warped in mind, his mold finally set.

After that he ceased to pick his way along the edges of the law, he slipped over. He followed many lines of endeavor, knew the back waters and hinterlands of many cities, ceased to be Lothar Heyderich and was known by other names. It was in Chicago, the winter before this story begins, that an attack of pneumonia brought him to the public ward of a hospital. Before his discharge, a doctor—a man who had noticed and been interested in him—gave him a word of warning:

"A warm climate—no more lake breezes for you. If you stay here and keep on swinging round the circle it won't be long before you swing back here to us—swing back to stay. Do you get me?"

He did, his face gone gray at this sudden vision of the end of all things. The doctor, in pity for what he was now and evidently once had been, gave him his fare to California.

It had been hell there. The climate had done its work, he was well, but he had felt himself more a pariah than ever before. He had seemed like a fly crawling over a glass shield under which tempting dainties are clearly visible and maddeningly unattainable. A man wanted money in California—with money could lead the life, half vagabondage, half lazy luxury, that was meat to his longing. Never had he been in a place that allured him more and that held him more contemptuously at arm's length.

He had sunk to his lowest depth in this tantalizing paradise, tramped the streets of cattle towns, herded with outcasts lower than himself. In Los Angeles he had washed dishes in a cafeteria, in Fresno polished the brasses in a saloon. And all around him was plenty, an unheeding prodigal luxuriance, Nature rioting in a boundless generosity. Her message came to him from sky and earth, from sweep of flowered land, from embowered village and thronging town—that life was good, to savor it, plunge in it, live it to the full. At times he felt half mad, struggling to exist in the midst of this smiling abundance.

When he began that upward march through the state he had no purpose, his mind was empty as a dried nut, the terrible lethargy of the tramp was invading him. From down-drawn brows he looked, morose, at a world which refused him entrance, and across whose surface he would drift aimless as a leaf on the wind. Then, the strength regained by exercise and air, the few dollars made by fruit picking, gave a fillip to his languishing spirit and an objective point rose on his vision. He would go to San Francisco—something might turn up there—and with his hoarded money buy cleanliness and one good meal. It grew before him, desirable, dreamed of, longed for—the bath, the restaurant, the delicate food, the bottle of wine. He was obsessed by it; the deluge could follow.

The wind, blowing through the open casement, brought him back to the present. The night had fallen, the street below a misty rift, its lights smothered in swimming vapor. There was brightness about it, blotted and obscured but gayly intentioned, even the sheds on the gore sending out golden gushes that suffused the milky currents with a clouded glow. He lighted the gas and looked at his watch—nearly seven. He would go out and dine—that dinner at last—and afterward drop in at the Albion and see Pancha Lopez, "the bandit's girl."



CHAPTER VIII

THOSE GIRLS OF GEORGE'S

The Alstons were finishing dinner. From over the table, set with the glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen Tisdale's gnarled old visage—she was over seventy and for several years now had given up all tiresome thought processes—but the girls were so smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the rounded freshness of their youthful faces.

The Alstons were conservative, clung to the ways of their parents. This was partly due to inheritance—mother and father were New Englanders—and partly to a reserved quality, a timid shyness, that marked Lorry who, as Aunt Ellen ceased to exert her thought processes and relapsed into a peaceful torpor, had assumed the reins of government. They conformed to none of those innovations which had come from a freer intercourse with the sophisticated East. The house remained as it had been in their mother's lifetime, the furniture was the same and stood in the same places, the table knew no modern enhancement of its solidly handsome fittings. Fong, the Chinese cook—he had been with George Alston before he married—ruled the kitchen and the two "second boys." No women servants were employed; women servants had not been a feature of domestic life in Bonanza days.

That was why the house was lit by chandeliers instead of lamps, that was why dinner was at half past six instead of seven, that was why George Alston's daughters had rather "dropped out." They would not move with the times, they would not be brought up to date. Friends of their mother's had tried to do it, rustled into the long drawing-room and masterfully attempted to assist and direct. But they had found Lorry unresponsive, listening but showing no desire to profit by the chance. They asked her to their houses—replenished, modern, object lessons to rich young girls—and hinted at a return of hospitalities. It had not been a success. She was disappointing, no snap, no go to her; the young men who sat beside her at dinner were bored, and the house on Pine Street had not opened its doors in reciprocal welcome. By the time she was twenty they shrugged their shoulders and gave her up—exactly like Minnie, only Minnie had always had George to push her along.

As the women friends of Minnie did their duty, the men friends of George—guardians of the estate—did theirs. They saw to it that the investments were gilt-edged, and the great ranch in Mexico that George had bought a few years before his death was run on a paying basis. At intervals they asked their wives with sudden fierceness if they had called on "those girls of George's," and the wives, who had forgotten all about it, looked pained and wanted to know the reason for such an unnecessary question. Within the week, impelled by a secret sense of guilt, the ladies called and in due course Lorry returned the visits. She suffered acutely in doing so, could think of nothing to say, was painfully conscious of her own dullness and the critical glances that wandered over her best clothes.

But she did not give much thought to herself. That she lacked charm, was the kind to be overlooked and left in corners, did not trouble her. Since her earliest memories—since the day Chrystie was born and her mother had died—she had had other people and other claims on her mind. Her first vivid recollection—terrible and ineffaceable—was of her father that day, catching her to him and sobbing with his face pressed against her baby shoulder. It seemed as if the impression made then had extended all through her life, turned her into a creature of poignant sympathies and an unassuagable longing to console and compensate. She had not been able to do that for him, but she had been able to love—break her box of ointment at his feet.

From that day the little child became the companion of the elderly man, her soft youth was molded to suit his saddened age, her deepest desire was a meeting of his wishes. Chrystie, whose birth had killed her mother, became their mutual joy, their shared passion. Chrystie-worship was inaugurated by the side of the blue and white bassinet, the nursery was a shrine, the blooming baby an idol installed for their devotion. When George Alston died, Lorry, thirteen years old, had dedicated herself to the service, held herself committed to a continuance of the rites. He had left her Chrystie and she would fulfill the trust even as he would have wished.

Probably it was this enveloping idolatry that had made Christie so unlike parents and sister. She was neither retiring nor serious, but social and pleasure-loving, ready to dance through life as irresponsibly enjoying as a mote in a sunbeam. And now Lorry had wakened to the perplexed realization that it was her affair to provide the sunbeam and she did not know how to do it. They were rich, they had a fine house, but nothing ever happened there and it was evident that Chrystie wanted things to happen. It was a situation which Lorry had not foreseen and before which she quailed, feeling herself inadequate. That was why, at twenty-three, a little line had formed between her eyebrows and her glance dwelt anxiously on Chrystie as an obligation—her great obligation—that she was not discharging worthily.

The glare of the chandelier revealed the girls as singularly unlike—Lorry—her full name was Loretta—was slender and small with nut-brown hair and a pale, pure skin. The richest note of color in her face was the rose of her lips, clearly outlined and smoothly pink. She had "thrown back" to her New England forbears. On the elm-shaded streets of Vermont villages one often sees such girls, fragile, finely feminine, with no noticeable points except a delicate grace and serenely honest eyes.

Chrystie was all California's—tall, broad-shouldered, promising future opulence, her skin a warm cream deepening to shades of coral, her hair a blonde cloud, hanging misty round her brows. She was as unsubtle as a chromo, as fragrantly fresh as a newly wakened baby. Her hands, large, plump, with flexible broad-tipped fingers, were ivory-colored and satin-textured, and her teeth, narrow and slightly overlapping, would go down to the grave with her if she lived to be eighty. Two months before she had passed her eighteenth birthday and was now of age and in possession of more money than she knew how to spend. She was easily amused, overflowing with good nature and good spirits as a healthy puppy, but owing to her sheltered environment and slight contact with the world was, like her sister, shy with strangers.

The meal was drawing to its end when the doorbell rang.

"A visitor," said Chrystie, lifting her head like a young stag. Then she addressed the waiting Chinaman, "Lee, let Fong open the door, I want more coffee."

Lee went to fetch the coffee and direct Fong. Everybody in the house always did what Chrystie said.

Aunt Ellen laid her old, full-veined hand on the table and pushed her chair back.

"Maybe it isn't a visitor," she said, looking tentatively at Lorry—she hated visitors, for she had to sit up. "Do you expect someone?"

Lorry shook her head. She rarely expected anyone; evening callers were generally school friends of Chrystie's.

Fong, muttering, was heard to pass from the kitchen.

"I do hope," said Christie, "if it's some horrible bore Fong'll have sense enough to shut them in the reception room and give us a chance to escape."

Chrystie, like Aunt Ellen, was fond of going to bed early. She had tried to instruct Fong in an understanding of this, but Fong, having been trained in the hospitable ways of the past, could not be deflected into more modern channels.

In his spotless white, his pigtail wound round his head, his feet in thick-soled Chinese slippers, he passed up the hall to the front door. Another chandelier hung there but in this only one burner was lit. At five in winter and at six in summer Fong lit this as he had done for the last twenty-four years. No one, no matter what the argument, could make him light it any earlier, any later, or turn the cock at a lesser or greater angle.

The visitor was Mark Burrage, and seeing this Fong broke into smiles and friendly greeting:

"Good evening, Mist Bullage—Glad see you, Mist Bullage. Fine night, Mist Bullage."

Fong was an old man—just how old nobody knew. For thirty-five years he had served the Alstons, had been George Alston's China boy in Virginia City, and then followed him, faithful, silent, unquestioning to San Francisco. There he had been the factotum of his "boss's" bachelor establishment, and seen him through his brief period of married happiness. On the day when Minnie Alston's coffin had passed through the front door, he had carefully swept up the flower petals from the parlor carpet, his brown face inscrutable, his heart bleeding for his boss.

Now his devotion was centered on the girls; "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist," he called them. He ruled them and looked out for their welfare—refused to buy canvasbacks till they fell to the price he thought proper, economized on the kitchen gas, gave them costly presents on the New Year, and inquired into the character of every full-grown male who crossed their threshold.

Mark Burrage he liked, found out about him through the secret channels of information that make Chinatown one of the finest detective bureaus in the land, and set the seal of his approval on the young man's visits. He would no more have shown him into the reception room and gone to see if "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist" were receiving, than he would have permitted them to change the dinner hour.

"You bin away, Mist Bullage," he said, placing the card the young man gave him on the hall table—cards were only presented in the case of strangers.

"How did you know that?" Mark asked, surprised.

Fong's face suggested intense, almost childish amusement.

"I dunno—I hear some place—I forget."

"I've been up in Sacramento County with my people—maybe Crowder told you."

"Maybe—I not good memly, I get heap old man." He made a move for the parlor door, his face wrinkled with his innocent grin. "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist here; awful glad see you," and he threw the door open.

Mark took a deep breath and strode forward, pulling his cuffs over his hands, which at that moment seemed to him to emerge from his sleeves large and unlovely as two hams. The place always abashed him, its sober air of wealth, its effortless refinement, its dainty feminine atmosphere. No brutal male presence—one never thought of Chinese servants as men—seemed ever to have disturbed with a recurring, habitual foot its almost cloistral quietude. Now with memories of his own home fresh in his mind, dinner in the kitchen, the soiled tablecloth, the sizzling pans on the stove, he felt he had no place there and was an impostor. Their greeting increased his discomfort. They were so kind, so hospitable, making him come into the dining room and take a cup of coffee. It was an uprush of that angry loyalty, that determination to hold close to his own, which made him say as soon as he was seated,

"I've been home for two weeks."

"Home?" said Lorry gently.

And, "Where is your home?" came from Aunt Ellen, as if she had just recognized the fact that he must have one somewhere but had never thought about it before.

The sound of his voice, gruff as a day laborer's after these flute-sweet tones, increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless he determined that he would tell them about his home.

"Up in Sacramento County not far from the tules. My father's a rancher, has a little bit of land there."

"Yes, Charlie Crowder told us," said Lorry. She didn't seem to notice the "little bit of land," it was just as if he'd said four or five thousand acres and described a balconied house with striped awnings and cushioned chairs.

He cast a glance of gratitude toward her, met her eyes and dropped his own to his cup. There they encountered his hand, holding the coffee spoon, the little finger standing out from the others in a tricksy curve. With an inward curse he straightened it, sudden red dyeing his face to the temples. He began to hate himself and didn't know how to go on.

Chrystie unexpectedly came to the rescue.

"Sacramento County," she exclaimed with sudden animation, "not far from the tules! There was a holdup round there two or three weeks ago. I read it in the papers."

Aunt Ellen moved restlessly. She wanted to get to her chair in the drawing-room.

"Holdup?" she murmured. "They're always having holdups somewhere."

"Not like this," said Chrystie. "It was a good one—Knapp and Garland—and they shot Wells Fargo's messenger."

"It was while I was there," said Mark, "up toward the foothills above our ranch."

The young ladies were immensely interested. They wanted to hear all about it and moved into the parlor to be settled and comfortable. They tried to make Mark sit in a massive, gold-trimmed armchair, but he had his wits about him by this time and took a humbler seat beside Lorry. Aunt Ellen sank into her rocker with a sigh of achievement and Chrystie perched on the piano stool. Then he told them the story, forgetting his bashfulness under the spell of their attentive eyes.

"Why can't they catch them," said Chrystie, "if they know their names?"

He couldn't help laughing at that.

"Why, of course they have other names," Lorry explained. "They don't go about as Knapp and Garland."

"But people must see them," Chrystie insisted, "somebody must know what they look like."

Mark had to straighten it out for her.

"Their friends do—ranchers up in the hills, and their pals in the towns. But the sheriffs and the general public don't. When they're out for business they cover their faces, tie handkerchiefs or gunny sacks round them."

Chrystie shuddered delightedly.

"How awful they must be! I'd love to be held up just to see them."

Mark and Lorry looked at one another and smiled, as age and experience smile at the artlessness of youth. It was an interchange of mutual understanding, a flash of closer intimacy, and as such lifted the young man to sudden heights.

"Where do they put the money?" said Aunt Ellen, her thought processes, under the unusual stimulus of a conversation on bandits, stirred to energy.

"That's what we'd like to know, Mrs. Tisdale. They have a cache somewhere but nobody's been able to find it. I saw the sheriff before I left and he thinks it's up in the hills among the chaparral."

"Is the messenger dead?" asked Lorry.

"Oh, no—he's getting on all right. They don't shoot to kill, just put him out of business for the time being."

"That's merciful," Aunt Ellen announced in a sleepy voice.

Chrystie, finding no more delicious shudders in the subject, twirled round on the stool and began softly picking out notes on the piano. For a space Mark and Lorry talked—it was about the ranch near the tules—rather dull as it came to Chrystie through her picking. The young man kept looking at Lorry's face, then dropping his glance to the floor, abashed before the gentle attention of her eyes, fearful his own might say too much. He thought it was just her sweetness that made her ask about his people, but everything about Mark Burrage interested her. Had he guessed it he would have been as much surprised as she had she known that he thought her beautiful.

Presently Chrystie's notes took form and became a tinkling tune. She tried it over once then whirled round on the stool.

"There—I've got it! Listen. Isn't it just like it, Lorry?"

Lorry immediately ceased talking and listened while the tune ran a halting course through several bars.

"Like what?" she said. "I don't know what it's meant to be."

"Oh!" Chrystie groaned, then shook her head at Mark. "Trust your relations to take down your pride. Why, it's the Castanet song from 'The Zingara!' Tum-tum-tum, tum-tum-tum," and she began swaying her body in time, humming an air and banging out the accompaniment, "'With my castanets, with my castanets.' That's exactly the way it goes only I don't know the words." She whirled again to Mark. "It's the most delicious thing! Have you seen it?"

He hadn't, and Chrystie sank together on the stool in reproachful surprise.

"Oh, Mr. Burrage, you must go. Don't lose a minute, this very night."

Lorry breathed an embarrassed "Chrystie!"

"I didn't mean that and he knows it. I mean the soonest night after tonight. We went yesterday and even Aunt Ellen loved it. Didn't you, Aunt Ellen?"

Aunt Ellen, startled from surreptitious slumber, gave an unnaturally loud assent to which Chrystie paid no attention.

"It's the new opera at the Albion and Pancha Lopez is—" She threw out her hands and looked at the ceiling, words inadequate.

"She's never done anything so good before," Lorry said.

"All in red and orange, and coins everywhere. Orange stockings and cute little red slippers, and two long braids of black hair. Oh, down to there," Chrystie thrust out her foot, her skirt drawn close over a stalwart leg, on which, just above the knee, she laid her finger tips. Her eyes on Mark were as unconscious as a baby's. "I don't think it's all her own, it's too long—I'll ask Charlie Crowder."

Aunt Ellen had not gone off again and to prove it said,

"How would he know?"

"Well he'd see it, wouldn't he? He'd see it when she took off her hat, all wound round her head, yards and yards of it. No, it's false, it was pinned on under that little cap thing. And after the second act when she came on to bow she carried a bunch of flowers—oh, that big," her arms outlined a wide ellipse, "the same colors as her dress, red carnations and some sort of yellowish flower I couldn't see plainly."

Mark, seeing some comment was expected of him, hazarded a safe,

"You don't say!"

"And just as she was going off"—Lorry took it up now—"she looked at someone in a box and smiled and—"

But Chrystie couldn't bear it. She leaned toward her sister imploringly.

"Now, Lorry, let me tell that—you know I noticed it first." Then to Mark, "She was close to the side where they go off and I was looking at her through the glasses, and I saw her just as plain give a sort of quick look into the box and then smile and point to the flowers. It was as if she said to the person in there, 'You see, I've got them.'"

"Who was in the box?"

Chrystie bounced exuberantly on the stool.

"That's the joke. None of us could see. Whoever he was he was far back, out of sight. It was awfully exciting to me for I simply adore Pancha Lopez and Charlie Crowder, who knows her so well, says she hasn't an admirer of any kind."

Aunt Ellen came to the surface with,

"Perhaps she's going to get one now."

And Lorry added,

"I hope, if she is, he'll be somebody nice. Mr. Crowder says she's had such a hard life and been so fine and brave all along."

Soon after that Mark left. There had been a time when the first move for departure was as trying as the ordeal of entrance, but he had got beyond that. Tonight he felt that he did it in quite an easy nonchalant way, the ladies, true to a gracious tradition, trailing after him into the hall. It was there that an unexpected blow fell; Chrystie, the enfant terrible, delivered it. Gliding about to the hummed refrain of the Castanet song her eye fell on his card. She picked it up and read it:

"Mark D.L. Burrage. What does D.L. stand for?"

It was Mark's habit, when this was asked, to square his shoulders, look the questioner in the eye, and say calmly, "Daniel Lawrence."

But now that fierce loyalty to his own, that chafed pride, that angry rebellion which this house and these girls roused in him, made him savagely truthful. A dark mahogany-red stained his face to the forehead and he looked at Chrystie with a lowering challenge.

"It stands for de Lafayette."

"De Lafayette!" she stared, amazed.

"Yes. My given name is Marquis de Lafayette."

There was a moment's pause. He saw Chrystie's face, blank, taking it in, then terrible rising questions began to show in her eyes. He went on, glaringly hostile, projecting his words at her as if she was a target and they were missiles:

"My mother liked the name. She thought it was unusual. It was she who gave it to me."

Chrystie's lips opened on a comment, also on laughter. He could see both coming and he braced himself, then Lorry's voice suddenly rose, quiet, unastonished, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have such a name:

"What a fine thing for her to do! She admired Lafayette and called you after him. I think it was splendid of her."

Outside, in the darkness of the street, he could almost have wept, in rage with himself, in the smart of her kindness.

He wished his mother had been there, in that hall, in her old clothes. He would have hugged her to him, protested that his name was the crowning glory of his life. He would have liked to face them down, show them his pride in her, let them hear him tell her that whatever she had done was in his opinion right.

The place where he lived was not far, a lodging house on one of the steep streets that sloped to the city's hollow. As he swung down the hills he thought of the hour of work he had promised himself, looked forward to with relish. Now his enthusiasm was gone, extinguished like a spark trodden out by a haughty foot. All he had done looked suddenly trivial, his rise from a farm hand a petty achievement, he himself a rough, uncultured boor. What right had he at the house of Lorry Alston, breaking himself against unsurmountable barriers? In the beginning he had only thought to enthrone her as an ideal, lovely, remote, unaspired to. She would be a star fixed in his sky, object of his undesiring worship. But it had not been that way. The star had not changed but he had ceased to bow in contemplation—looked up, loved and longed.

The back wall of his dwelling rose above the trees and he saw the darkling panes of his own windows. Soon his lamplight would glow through them, and he would be in the armchair with his book and his pipe. The picture brought back a surge of his conquering spirit. Nothing he had set his hand to had beaten him yet. If he fought as he had fought for his education, was fighting now for his place, he could fight up to her side. There was no rival in sight; Crowder, who knew them well, had told him so. He could put out all his energies, do more than man had ever done before, climb, if not to her proud place, at least where he did not come as a beggar to a queen. Then, on his feet, the future clearing before him, he could go to her and try and win. He drew a deep breath and looked up at the stars, remote as she had seemed that evening. The lift of his passion swept him aloft on a wave of will and he murmured, "If she were there among you, I'd try and get to her and carry her away in my arms."

Meantime he would not go to her house any more—at least not for a long time. There was no good; he was not the man to sit round in parlors looking and acting like a fool. He could only work, blaze the trail, make the clearing, raise the homestead, and when it was ready go and tell her so.



CHAPTER IX

GREEK MEETS GREEK

Early on the evening when the Alstons had seen "The Zingara," Boye Mayer walked up Kearney Street looking into florists' windows. A cigarette depended from his lip, his opened overcoat disclosed the glossy whiteness of a shield-like shirt bosom, his head was crowned by a shining top hat. He was altogether a noticeable and distinguished figure.

He had been twice to the Albion and was going again this evening, having already engaged the right-hand stage box. Now he was purporting to send Pancha Lopez a third floral tribute and with it reveal his identity. The two previous ones had been anonymous, but tonight her curiosity—roused to a high pitch, or he knew nothing of women—would be satisfied. She would not only know who her unknown admirer was, but she would see him sitting in stately solitude in the right-hand box.

She had been a great surprise. Where he had expected to find an overblown, coarse woman with the strident voice of the music hall and its banal vulgarities, he had seen a girl, young, spontaneous, full of a sparkling charm. He had heard enough singing to know that her voice, fresh and untrained, had promise, and that the spirited dash of her performance indicated no common gifts. Under any circumstances she would have interested him; how much more so now when he knew of her affiliation with a notorious outlaw! She was evidently a potent personality, lawless and daring. The situation appealed to his slyly malign humor, she confidently secure, he completely informed. It was a fitting sequel to the picaresque adventure and he anticipated much entertainment from meeting her, saw himself, with stealthy adroitness, worming his way toward her guilty secrets.

A florist's window, a bower of blossoms under the gush of electric lights, attracted him and he turned into the shop. The proprietor came forward, ingratiatingly polite, his welcoming words revealing white teeth and a foreign accent.

The gentleman wanted a large sheaf bouquet in two colors, red and orange—certainly, and a Gallic wave of the hand indicated a marble slab where flowers were ranged in funnel-shaped green vases. Looking over them, the gentleman lapsed into a French so perfect that the florist suggested Monsieur was of that nation, also his own. Monsieur neither admitted nor denied the charge, occupied over the flowers. He was very particular about them—perhaps the florist would understand better what he wanted when he knew they were for Miss Lopez at the Albion and were designed to match her gypsy dress.

Ah, perfectly—several vases were drawn forward—and over these the two men talked of Miss Lopez and her admirable performance.

"A true artist," the florist thought, "young, and without training as Monsieur can see. A Californian, a girl of the people, risen from nothing. But no doubt Monsieur has already heard her history."

Monsieur was a stranger, he knew little of the lady, and, apparently engrossed in his selection of the flowers, heard such facts in the career of Pancha Lopez as the public were allowed to know. The florist ended the biography with what should be—for the gentleman ordering so costly a bouquet—the most notable item—Miss Lopez was a girl of spotless reputation.

Monsieur looked surprised:

"Has no favored one, no lovers?"

The florist, combining a scarlet carnation with a sunset rose, shrugged his shoulders, treating the subject with the lively gravity of the Gaul:

"None, Monsieur. It is known that many men have paid their court, but no—good-day to you and out they go! She wants nobody—it is all work, work, work. A good, industrious girl, very unusual when one considers her beginnings. But being so, and with her talents, she will arrive. My God, it is certain."

Monsieur appeared no longer interested. He paid for his bouquet, which was to be sent to the stage door that evening, then wrote a message on a card. This time the card bore no "swell sentiment;" the words were frank and to the point:

"Why can't I know you? I want to so much. I am alone here and a stranger. If you care to look me over and see if you think I'm worth meeting, I'll be in the right-hand stage box tonight.

"BOYE MAYER,

"Argonaut Hotel."

As he walked to the Albion he thought over what he had heard. It was very different from what he had expected to hear and increased his interest in her. He had given her credit for a high artistic intelligence, but evidently she possessed the other kind too. How else could she have spread an impression of herself so unlike what she really was? A deep, rusee girl! He began to be very keen to meet her and see which of the two would be the more expert in the duel of attack and parry.

The flowers and the note were delivered in the first entr'acte. With a sliding rush Pancha was back on the stage, her eye glued to the peephole in the curtain. What she saw held her tranced. Like Mark, her standards suffered from a limited experience. That the effective pose was studied, the handsome face hard and withered, the evening dress too showily elegant, escaped her. She had never—except on the covers of magazines—seen such a man.

The stage hands had to pull her away from the curtain and she went to her dressing room with her cheeks crimson under the rouge and her eyes like black diamonds. Upon his own stage, plumed, spurred and cloaked, romance had entered with the tread of the conqueror.

After the second gift of flowers her curiosity was as lively as Mayer had expected. But she was not going to show it, she was going to be cool and indifferent till he made himself known. Then she contemplated a guarded condescension, might agree to be met and even called upon; a man who wrote such sentiments and gave such bouquets should not be treated with too much disdain. But when she saw him, her surprise was so great that she forgot all her haughty intentions. Gratified vanity surged through her. At one moment she thrilled with the anticipation of meeting such a personage, and at the next drooped to fears that she might disappoint his fastidious taste.

That night she answered the letter, writing it over several times:

MR. BOYE MAYER,

DEAR FRIEND:

Thanks for the flowers. They're grand. I ain't ever before had such beautys espechully the ones that matched my dress. I looked you over and I don't think you're so bad, so if you still want to know me maybe you can. I live in the Vallejo Hotel on Balboa Street and if you'd give yourself the pleasure of calling I'll be there Tuesday at four.

Yours truly,

Miss PANCHA LOPEZ.

P. S. Balboa Street is in the Mission.

The next evening she received his answer, thanking her for her kindness and saying he would come.

She prepared for him with sedulous care, not only her room and her clothes, but herself. She was determined she would comport herself creditably, would be equal to the occasion and fulfill the highest expectations. She was going to act like a lady—no one would ever suspect she had once waited on table in the Buon Gusto restaurant, or been a barefoot, miner's kid. As she put on her black velveteen skirt and best crimson crepe blouse, she pledged herself to a wary refinement, laid the weight of it on her spirit. The only models she had to follow were the leading ladies of the road companies she had seen, and she impressed upon her mind details of manner from the heroines of "East Lynne" and "The Banker's Daughter."

When four o'clock struck she was seated by the center table, a book negligently held in one hand, her feet, in high-heeled, beaded slippers, neatly crossed, and a gold bracelet given her by her father on her arm. She took a last, inspecting glance round the room and found it entirely satisfactory. On the table beside her a battered metal tray held a bottle of native Chianti, two glasses and a box of cigarettes. In Pancha's world a visitor was always offered liquid refreshment and she had chosen the Chianti as less plebeian than beer and not so expensive as champagne. She had no acquaintance with either wine or cigarettes; her thrifty habits and care of her voice made her shun both.

Mayer recognized the room as a familiar type—he had been in many such in many lands. But the girl did not fit it. She looked to him very un-American, more like a Spaniard or a French midinette. There was nothing about her that suggested the stage, no make-up, none of its bold coquetry or crude allure. She was rather stiff and prim, watchful, he thought, and her face added to the impression. With its high cheek bones and dusky coloring he found it attractive, but also a baffling and noncommittal mask.

He was even more than she had anticipated. His deep bow over her hand, his deference, thrilled her as the Prince might have thrilled Cinderella. She was very careful of her manners, keeping to the weather, expressing herself with guarded brevity. A chill constraint threatened to blight the occasion, but Mayer, versed in the weaknesses of stage folk, directed the conversation to her performance in "The Zingara," for which he professed an ardent admiration.

"I was surprised by it, even after what I'd heard. I wonder if you know how good it is?"

Her color deepened.

"I try to make it good, I've been trying for six years."

He smiled.

"Six years! You must have begun when you were a child."

This was too much for Pancha. Her delight at his praise had been hard to suppress; now it burst all bonds. She forgot her refinement and the ladylike solemnity of her face gave place to a gamin smile.

"Oh, quit it. You can't hand me out that line of talk. I'm twenty-two and nobody believes it."

Then he laughed and the constraint was dissipated like a morning mist. They drew nearer to the table and Pancha offered the wine. To be polite she took a little herself and Mayer, controlling grimaces as he sipped, asked her about her career. She told him what she was willing to tell; nothing of her private life which she thought too shamefully sordid. It was a series of jumps from high spot to high spot in her gradual ascent. He noticed this and judged it as a story edited for the public, it tallied so accurately with what he had heard already from the florist. There was evidently a rubber stamp narrative for general circulation.

After she had concluded he made his first advance, lightly with an air of banter.

"And how does it come that in this long, lonely struggle you've stayed unmarried?"

A belated coquetry—Pancha climbing up had wasted no time on such unassisting arts—stirred in her. She tilted her head and shot a look at him from the sides of her eyes.

"I guess no one came along that filled the bill."

"Among all the men that must have come along?"

"Um-um," she stood her glass on the table, turning its stem with her long brown fingers.

"The lady must be hard to please."

"Maybe she is."

Her eyes rested on the ruby liquid in the glass. The lids were fringed with black lashes that grew straightly downward, making a semicircle of little, pointed dashes on each cheek. He could not decide whether she was embarrassed or slyly amused.

"Or perhaps she's just wedded to her art."

"That cuts some ice, I guess."

"Love is known to improve art. Haven't you ever heard that?"

"I shouldn't wonder. I've heard an awful lot about love."

"Only heard, never felt? Never responded to any of the swains that have been crowding round?"

"How do you know they've been crowding round?"

He leaned nearer, gently impressive:

"What I'm looking at tells me so."

She met his eyes charged with sentimental meaning, and burst into irrepressible laughter.

"Oh, you—shut up! I ain't used to such hot air. I'll have to open the windows and let in the cold."

It was not what he had expected and he felt rebuffed. Dropping back in his chair, he shrugged his shoulders.

"What can I say? It's not fair to let me come here and then muzzle me."

"Oh, I ain't going as far as that. But you don't have to talk to me that way. I'm the plain, sensible kind."

He shook his head, slowly, incredulously.

"No, I've got to contradict you. Lips can tell lies but eyes can't. You're a good many other things but you're not sensible."

"What other things?"

"Charming, fascinating, piquant, with a heart like a bright, glowing coal."

She threw back her head and let her laughter, rich and musical, float out on the room.

"Oh, listen to him! Wouldn't it make a dog laugh!" Then, swaying on her chair, she leaned toward him, grave but with her eyes twinkling. "Mr. Man, you can't read me for a cent. Right here," she touched her heart with a finger tip, "it's frozen hard. I keep it in cold storage."

"Hasn't it ever been taken out and thawed?"

"Never has and never will be."

She swayed away from him, keeping her glance on his. For a still second a strange seriousness, having no place in the scene, held them. She was conscious of perplexity in his face, he of something wistful and questioning in hers. She spoke first.

"You're very curious about me, Mr. Boye Mayer?"

She ought not to have said that and it was his fault that she did. She was no mean adversary and that she had seen through his first tentatives proved them clumsy and annoyed him. He smiled, a smile not altogether pleasant, and rose.

"All men must be curious where you're concerned."

"Not as bad as you."

"Ah, well, I'm a child of nature. I don't hide my feelings. I'm curious and show it. Do you know what makes me so?"

She shook her head, anticipating flatteries. But he did not break into them as quickly as she had expected. Turning to where his hat lay he took it up, looked at it for a moment and then, with his gray eyes shifting to hers, said low, as if taking her into his confidence:

"I'm curious because you're interesting. I think you're the most interesting thing I've seen since I came to San Francisco."

This was even more than she had hoped for. An unfamiliar bashfulness made her look away from the gray eyes and stammer in rough deprecation:

"Oh, cut it out!"

"I never cut out the truth. But I'm going to cut out myself. It's time for me to be moving on. Good-by."

His hand was extended and she put hers into it, feeling the light pressure of his cool, dry fingers. She did not know what to say, wanted to ask him to come again, but feared, in her new self-consciousness, it wasn't the stylish thing to do.

"I'm real glad you called," was the nearest she dared.

He was at the door and turned, hopefully smiling.

"Are you?"

"Sure," she murmured.

"Then why don't you ask me to come again?"

"I thought that was up to you."

He again was unable to decide whether her coyness was an expression of embarrassment or an accomplished artfulness, but he inclined to the latter opinion.

"Right O! I'll come soon, in a few days. Hasta manana, fair lady."

After the door had closed on him she stood sunk in thought, from which she emerged with a deep sigh. A slow, gradual smile curved her lips; she raised her head, looked about her, then moving to the mirror, halted in front of it. The day was drawing toward twilight, pale light falling in from the bay window and meeting the shadows in the back of the room. Her figure seemed to lie on the glass as if floating on a pool of darkness. The black skirt melted into it, but the crimson blouse and the warm pallor of the face and arms emerged in liquid clearness, richly defined, harmoniously glowing. She looked long, trying to see herself with his eyes, trying to know herself anew as pretty and bewitching.

Mayer walked home wondering. He was completely intrigued by her. Her performance in "The Zingara" had led him to expect a girl of much more poise and finish, and yet with all her rawness she was far from naive. His own experience recognized hers; both had lived in the world's squalid byways; he could have talked to her in their language and she would have understood. But she was not of the women of such places, she had a clean, clear quality like a flame. Daring beyond doubt, wild and elusive, but untouched by what had touched the rest. He found it inexplicable, unless one granted her unusual capacity, unsuspected depths and a rare and seasoned astuteness. He had to come back to that and he was satisfied to do so. It would add zest to the duel which had just begun.



CHAPTER X

MICHAELS, THE MINER

So distinguished a figure as Boye Mayer could not live long unnoticed in San Francisco. He had not been a month at the hotel before items about him appeared in the press. Mrs. Wesson, society reporter of the Despatch, after seeing him twice on Kearney Street, found out who he was and rustled into the Argonaut office for a word with Ned Murphy. Mr. Mayer was a wealthy gentleman from New York, but back of that Murphy guessed he was foreign, anyway the Frenchwoman who did his laundry and the Dutch tailor who pressed his clothes said he could talk their languages like he was born in the countries. He wasn't friendly, sort of distant; all he'd ever said to Murphy was that he was on the coast for his health and wanted to live very quiet to get back his strength after an illness.

It wasn't much but Mrs. Wesson made a paragraph out of it that neatly rounded off her column.

Even without the paragraphs he would not have been unheeded. Among the carelessly dressed men, bustling along the streets in jostling haste, he loomed immaculately clad, detached, splendidly idle amidst their vulgar activity. He had the air of unnoticing hauteur, unattainable by the American and therefore much prized. His clean-shaven, high-nosed face was held in a brooding abstraction, his well-shod foot seemed to press the pavement with disdain. Eating a solitary dinner at Jack's or Marchand's, he looked neither to the right nor the left. Beauty could stare and whisper and he never give it the compliment of a glance. Ladies who entertained began to inquire about him, asked their menkind to find out who he was, and if he was all right make his acquaintance and "bring him to the house."

He was not so solitary as he looked. Besides Pancha Lopez he had met other people. The wife of the manager of the Argonaut Hotel had asked him to a card party, found him "a delightful gentleman" and handed him on to her friends. They too had found him "a delightful gentleman" and the handing on had continued. He enjoyed it, slipping comfortably into the new environment—it was a change after the sinister years beyond the pale, and the horrible, outcast days. Also he did not confine himself to the small sociabilities to which he was handed on. There were many paths of profit and pleasure in the city by the Golden Gate and he explored any that offered entertainment—those that led to tables green as grass under the blaze of electric lights, those that led to the poker game behind Soledad Lanza's pink-fronted restaurant, those that led up alleys to dark, secretive doors, and that which led to Pancha's ugly sitting room.

He sought this one often and yet for all his persuasive cunning he found out nothing, got no further, surprised no admissions. He was drawn back there teased and wondering and went away again, piqued and baffled.

One evening, a month after her first meeting with him, Pancha, going home on the car, thought about her father. She felt guilty, for of late she had rather forgotten him and this was something new and blameworthy. Now she remembered how long it was since she had seen him and that his last letter had come over a month ago. It was a short scrawl from Downieville and had told her that the sale of his prospect hole—he had hoped to sell it sometime early in September—had fallen through. He had seemed down-hearted.

Despite the divergent lines of their lives a great tie of affection united them. They met only at long intervals—when he came into town for a night—and all correspondence between them was on his side as she never knew where he was. Even had he not lavished a rough tenderness upon her, the memory of pangs mutually suffered, of hardships mutually endured, would have bound her to him. He was the only person who had passed, closely allied, an intimate figure, through the full extent of her life. Though he was so much to her she never spoke of him, except to Charlie Crowder, her one friend, of whose discretion she was sure. This reticence was partly due to tenderness—the past and his place in it had their sacredness—and partly to the miner's own wish. As her star had risen it was he who had suggested the wisdom of "keeping him out." He thought it bad business; an opera singer's father—especially a father with a pick and a pan—had no advertising value and might be detrimental. When he put it that way she saw the sense of it—Pancha was always quick to see things from a business angle—and fell in with his wish. She was not unwilling to. It wasn't that she was ashamed of him, she cared too little for the world to be ashamed of anything, but she did not want him made a joke of in the wings or written up satirically in the theatrical column. When small road managers who had known her at the start came into town and asked where "Pancha's Pa" was, nobody knew anything about such a person, and they guessed "the old guy must have died."

Since she had lived at the Vallejo Hotel he had been there five times, always after dark. She had told Cushing, the night clerk, that Mr. Michaels was a relation of hers from the country and if he came when she was out to let him into her rooms.

As she drew up at the desk and asked for her key—it hung on a rack studded with little hooks—Cushing, drowsing with his feet on a chair, rose wearily, growling through a yawn:

"Mr. Michaels has came. He's been here about an hour. I done what you said and let him in."

She smothered an expression of joy, snatched the key and ran upstairs. Lovely—just as she was thinking of him! She let herself in anticipating a glad welcome and saw that he was lying on the sofa asleep.

The only light in the room was from the extension lamp on the table and by its shaded glow she stood looking at him. He was sleeping heavily, still wrapped in the old overcoat she knew so well, his coarse hands, with blackened finger nails, clasped on his breast. His face, relaxed in rest, looked worn, the forehead seamed with its one deep line, the eyes sunk below the grizzled brows. It came upon her with a shock that he seemed old and tired, and it hurt her. In a childish desire to bring him back to himself, have him assume his familiar aspect and stop her pain, she shook him by the shoulder, crying:

"Pa, Pa, wake up."

He woke with a violent start, his feet swung to the floor, his body hunched as if to spring, his glance wildly alive. Then it fell on her and the fierce alertness died out; his face softened into a smile, almost sheepish, and he rubbed his hand over his eyes.

"Lord, I was asleep," he muttered.

She kissed him, pulled him up, and with an arm round his back, steered him to an armchair, asking questions. His hand on her waist patted softly.

"Well, you ain't fattened up any," he said with a quizzical grin and side glance.

That made him look more like himself, but Pancha noticed that his movements were stiff.

"What's the matter?" she said sharply. "You ain't got the rheumatism again, have you?"

"Nup," he sank slowly into the chair. "But sometimes when I first move I sort 'er kink at the knees. Gets me in the morning, but I limber up all right."

She stood beside him, uneasily frowning.

"What are you goin' to do this winter when the rains begin? You can't run risks of being sick, and me not able to get to you."

"Sick—hell!" He shot a humorous look at her. "I ain't sick in God's own country—it's only down here. Why y'ain't all as stiff as stone images in this sea-damp beats me."

"Oh, it's the damp," she said, relieved.

"Course it's the damp. I wouldn't expect a rope dancer to live here and stay spry."

That was like Pa; her anxiety evaporated and she began to smile.

"Well, there's one person who does—yours truly. If you don't believe it, come to the Albion and see."

"There ain't another like you, hon. There's not your match from the Rockies to the Pacific."

"Oh, old blarney!" she cried, now joyous, and, giving him a pat on the shoulder, moved about collecting supper. "Sit tight there while I get you a bite. I've some olives that'll make you think you're back among the greasers."

The supper came from divers places—the window sill, the top bureau drawer, the closet shelf. Beer and sardines were its chief features, with black olives soaked in oil and garlic, cheese straws taken from a corset box, and ripe figs oozing through their paper bag.

They ate hungrily without ceremony, wiping their fingers on the towel she had spread for a cloth. As they munched they swapped their news—his failure at selling the ledge, her success in "The Zingara." He listened to that with avid attention.

"Can you stay and see me tomorrow night?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"'Fraid not. I got a date with a feller in Dutch Flat for tomorrow afternoon."

"About the prospect?"

"Yep—it's a chance and I got to jump at it."

"Why did it fall through before?"

He shoveled in a cracker spread with sardines before he answered.

"Oh, same old story—thought it didn't show up as big as they'd expected. You can't count on it, no more'n you can on the weather."

She smothered a sigh. The "prospect" and the "ledge" had been part of their life, lifting them to high hopes, dropping them to continual disappointment. She would have counseled him to give it all up, but that he now and then had had luck, especially in the last five years. She went back to herself.

"'The Zingara' has been a great thing for me. Everybody says so. If the next piece goes as big I'm going to strike for a raise. Wait till I show you," she jumped up, rubbing her oily fingers on the towel, "and you'll see why little Panchita's had to get an extra-sized hat."

She took from a side table a book—the actress's scrap album—and came back flirting its pages. At one she pressed it open and held it toward him, triumphantly pointing to a clipping. "There, from the Sacramento Courier."

He gave a glance at the clipping and said:

"Oh, yes, that. Grand, ain't it?"

She was surprised.

"You've seen it. Why didn't you send it to me?"

"Who said I'd seen it?" He took the book from her, staring across it, suddenly combative. "Don't you run along so fast. Ain't you known if I had I'd have mailed it to you?"

"But how did you know about it?" she said, her surprise growing, for she saw he was moved.

"You're gettin' too darned quick." He pushed the book in among the dishes roughly, his irritation obvious.

"Ain't it possible I might have heard it? Might have met a feller that come up from Marysville who'd seen It and told me?"

"Yes, of course it is. You needn't get mad about it."

"Mad—who said I was mad?" He bent over the book, muttering like a storm in retreat. "I guess I ain't missed so many that when one does get by me you should throw it in my teeth."

She smoothed the top of his head with a placating hand and went back to her seat. Nibbling a ripe olive she watched him as he read. Her eyes were anxiously questioning. This too—anger at so small a thing—was unlike him.

When he had finished his annoyance was over; pride beamed from his face as if a light was lit behind it.

"I guess there ain't many of 'em get a write-up like that." He put the book aside and began a second attack on the supper. "Crowder's some friend. His little finger's worth more'n the whole kit and crew you've had danglin' round you since you started."

"You're right." She stretched her hand for a fig, spilling, bruised and bursting, from the torn bag. "There's a new one dangling."

With her father Pancha was always truthful. To the rest of the world she lied whenever she thought it necessary, never carelessly or prodigally, for to be fearless was part of her proud self-sufficiency. But as she had learned to fight, to battle her way up, to climb over her enemy, to wrest her chance from opposing forces, she had learned to lie when the occasion demanded. She was only entirely frank and entirely truthful with the one person whom she loved.

He put down his glass and looked at her, in sudden, fixed attention.

"What's that?"

"I've got a real, genuine, all-wool-yard-wide beau."

She leaned her elbows on the table, holding the fig to her mouth, her thin fingers manipulating the skin as she sucked the pulp. Her eyes were full of laughter.

"What do you mean?"

"Just what I'm telling you. You needn't look like I'd said he was a defaulting bank cashier, nor so surprised either. It ain't flattering to your only child."

Her father did not respond to her gayety.

"Look-a-here, Panchita," he began, but she stopped him, flapping a long hand.

"Cut it out, Pop. I know all that. You needn't come any stern parent business over me. I'm on. I know my way about. I ain't going to run my head into any noose, or tie any millstone round my neck. Don't you think by this time you can trust me?"

Her words seemed to reassure him. The bovine intensity of his gaze softened.

"You've had a heap of beaux," he said moodily.

"And kept every last one of 'em in their place, except for those I kicked out. And they got to their place; my kick landed them there."

"Who is he?"

Pancha returned to her fig, looking over its wilted skin for clinging tidbits.

"Named Mayer, a foreigner—at least he's born here, but he looks foreign and acts foreign; hands out the kind of talk you read in books. Awful high class."

"Treats you respectful?"

She gave him a withering glance.

"Respectful! Treats me like I'd faint if he spoke rough or break if he touched me. I ain't ever seen anything so choice. You said I was thin—it's keeping up such a dignified style that's worn me down."

This description was so unlike the bandit's idea of love-making that he became incredulous.

"How do you know he's a beau? Looks like to me he was just marking time."

She smiled, the secret smile of a woman who has seen the familiar signs. She had taken another fig and delicately breaking it open, eyed its crimson heart.

"He's jealous."

"Who of?"

"Nobody, anybody, everybody." She began to laugh, and putting her lips to the fruit, sucked, and then drew them away stained with its ruby juice. "He's always trying to draw me, find out if there isn't somebody I like. Pop, you'd laugh if you could hear him sniffing round the subject like a cat round the cream."

"What do you tell him?"

"Me?" She gave him a scornful cast of her eye. Her face was flushed, and with her crimsoned mouth and shining eyes she was for the moment beautiful. "I got my pride. I told him the truth at first, and when he wouldn't believe me—'Oh, no, there must be someone'—I says to myself, 'All right, deary, have it your own way,' and I jolly him along now," she laughed with joyous memory. "I got him good and guessing, Pop."

The old man looked dissatisfied.

"I ain't much stuck on this, Panchita. What good are you goin' to get out of it?"

"Fun!" she cried, throwing the fig skin on the table. "Don't I deserve some after six years? If he wants to act like a fool that's his affair, and believe me, he's able to take care of himself. And so am I. No one knows that better than you do, deary."

He left soon after that. In his nomad life, with its long gaps of separation from her, it was easy for him to keep his movements concealed and caution had become a habit. So he had not told her that on his last visit to the city he had taken a room, instead of going to one of the men's hotels that dotted the Mission. It was in a battered, dingy house that crouched in shame-faced decay behind the shrubs and palms of a once jaunty garden. Mrs. Meeker, the landlady, was a respectable woman who had seen so complete an extinction of fortune that she asked nothing of her few lodgers but the rent in advance and a decent standard of sobriety. To the bandit it offered a seclusion so grateful that he had resolved to keep it, a hiding-place to which he could steal when the longing for his child would not be denied.

The house was not far from the Vallejo Hotel, on a cross street off one of the main avenues of traffic. As he rounded the corner he saw the black bushiness of its garden and then, barring the night sky, the skeleton of a new building. The sight gave him a disagreeable shock; anything that let more life and light into that secluded backwater was a menace. He approached, anxiously scanning it. It took the place of old rookeries, demolished in his absence, one side rising gaunt and high against Mrs. Meeker's. He leaned from the front steps and looked over the fence; the separation between the two walls was not more than two or three feet.

His room was on the top floor in the back, and gaining it, he jerked up the shade and looked out. Formerly a row of dreary yards extended to the houses in the rear. Now the frame of the new building filled them in, projecting in sketchy outline to the end of the lots. Disturbed he studied it—four stories, a hotel, apartments, or offices. Whatever it was it would be bad for him, bringing men so close to his lair.

He stood for some time gazing out, saw a late, lopsided moon swim into the sky and by its light the yard below develop a beauty of glistening leaves and fretted shadows. The windows of the houses beyond the fence shone bright, glazed with a pallid luster. Even Mrs. Meeker's stable, wherein she kept her horse and cart, the one relic saved from better days, stood out darkly picturesque amid the frosted silver of vines. He saw nothing of all this, only the black skeleton which would soon be astir with the life he shunned.

He drew down the shade and dropped heavily into a chair, his feet sprawled, his chin sunk on his breast. The single gas jet emitted a torn yellow flame that issued from the burner with a stuttering, ripping sound. The light gilded the bosses of his face, wax-smooth above the shadowed hollows, and it looked even older than it had in sleep. His spirit drooped in a somber exhaustion—he was so tired of it all, of the stealth, the watchfulness, the endless vigilance, the lack of rest. One more coup, one lucky haul, and he was done. Then there would be the ranch, peace, security, an honest ending, and Pancha, believing, never knowing.



CHAPTER XI

THE SOLID GOLD NUGGET

The autumn was drawing to an end and the winter season settling into its gait. Everybody was back in town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already—a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening and little houses that had been open all along were trying to pretend they had been shut. Furs were being hung on clothes lines and raincoats brought out of closets. Violets would soon be blooming around the roots of the live oaks and the Marin County hills be green. In short the San Francisco winter was at hand.

The Alston house had been cleaned and set in order from the cellar to the roof and in its dustless, shining spaciousness Lorry sat down and faced her duties. The time had come for her to act. Chrystie must take her place among her fellows, be set forth, garnished and launched as befitted the daughter of George Alston. It was an undertaking before which Lorry's spirit quailed, but it was part of the obligation she had assumed. Though she had accepted the idea, the translation from contemplation to action was slow. In fact she might have stayed contemplating had not a conversation one night with Chrystie nerved her to a desperate courage.

The girls occupied two adjoining rooms on the side of the house which overlooked the garden. Across the hall was their parents' room, exactly the same as it had been when Minnie Alston died there. Behind it were others, large, high-ceilinged, with vast beds and heavy curtains. These had been tenanted at long intervals, once by an uncle from the East, since deceased, and lately by the Barlow girls, Chrystie's friends from San Mateo. That had been quite an occasion. Chrystie talked of it as she did of going to the opera or on board the English man-of-war.

Lorry was sitting in front of the glass brushing her hair, when Chrystie, supposedly retired, came in fully dressed. She dropped onto the side of the bed, watching her sister, with her head tilted, her eye dreamily ruminant.

"What's the matter, dear?" said Lorry. "Why aren't you in bed?"

Chrystie yawned.

"I can't possibly imagine except that I don't want to be there," came through the yawn.

"Aren't you sleepy?"

"In a sort of way." She yawned again and stretched with a wide spread of arms. "I seem to be sleepy on the outside but it doesn't go down into my soul."

Lorry, drawing the comb through her long hair which fell in a shining sweep from her forehead to the chair seat, wanted this explained. But her sister vaguely shook her head and stared at the carpet, then, after a pause, murmured:

"I wish something would happen."

"What kind of thing?"

"Oh, just something—any old thing would be a change."

Lorry stopped combing.

"Do you mean that you're dull?" she asked. The worried gravity of her face did not fit the subject.

"That must be it." Chrystie raised her eyes and looked at the cornice, her red lips parted, her glance becoming animated. "Yes, of course, that's it—I'm dull. Why didn't I see it myself? You've put it before me in letters of fire—I'm dreadfully dull."

"What would you like to do?"

"Have some good times, lots of them. There aren't enough of them this way. We can't go to the theater too often or we'd get used to it, and I can't get the Barlows to come up here every week, they have such crowds of engagements."

She sighed at the memory of the Barlows' superior advantages and the sigh sounded like a groan of reproach in Lorry's ears. Innocently, unconsciously, unaccusingly, Chrystie was rubbing in the failure of her stewardship. She combed at the ends of her hair, her eyes blind to its burnished brightness.

"Would you like to have a party here?" she said in a solemn voice.

Chrystie's glance was diverted from the cornice, wide open and astonished.

"A party here, in this house?"

"Yes, it's big enough. There's plenty of room and we can afford it."

"But, Lorry"—the proposition was so startling that she could hardly believe it—"a real party?"

"Any kind of a party you want. We might have several. We could begin with a dinner; Fong can cook anything."

Chrystie, the idea accepted and held in dazzled contemplation, suddenly saw a flaw.

"But where would we get any men?"

"We know some and we could find some more."

"You talk as if you could find them scattered about on the ground the way they found nuggets in '49. Let's count our nuggets." She held up the spread fingers of a large white hand, bending one down with each name. "There's Charlie Crowder if he can get off, and his friend Robinson in the express company, and Roy Barlow, whom I know so well I could recite him in my sleep, and Mrs. Kirkham's grandnephew who looks like a child—and—and—good gracious, Lorry, is that all our nuggets?"

"We could have some of those young men whose mothers knew ours."

"You said you didn't like them."

"I know I did, but if you're going to give parties you have to have people you don't like to fill up."

"Um," Chrystie pondered, "I suppose you must. Oh, there's Marquis de Lafayette."

"Yes," said Lorry, "I thought of him."

Chrystie's eyes, bright with question, rested on her sister.

"You can't exactly call him a nugget."

"Why not?"

"Because he doesn't shine, darling."

This explanation appeared to strike its maker as a consummate witticism. She fell back on the bed in spasms of laughter.

Lorry looked annoyed.

"He's nicer than any of the others, I think."

"Of course he is, but he's been buried too long in the soil; he needs polishing." She rolled over on the bed in her laughter.

Lorry began to braid her hair, her face grave.

"I don't think things like that matter a bit, and I don't see at all what you're laughing at."

"I'm laughing at Marquis de Lafayette. I can't help it—something about his hands and his manners. They're so ponderously polite; maybe it's from waiting on table in the students' boarding house."

"I never knew you were a snob before, Chrystie."

"I guess I am. Isn't it awful? Oh, dear, I've laughed so much I've got a pain. It's perfectly true, I'm a snob. I like my nuggets all smooth and shiny with no knobs or bits of earth clinging to them."

Lorry's hair was done and she rose and approached her sister.

"You've spoiled my bed. Get off it and go."

But Chrystie would not move. With her face red and the tears of her laughter standing in her eyes she gazed at the serious one.

"Lorry, darling, you look so sweet in that wrapper with your hair slicked back. You look like somebody I know. Who is it? Oh, of course, the Blessed Damozel, leaning on the bar of Heaven, only it's the bar of the bed."

"Don't be silly, Chrystie. Get up."

"Never till I have your solemn, eternal, sworn-to promise."

"What promise?"

"To give that party."

"You have it—I said I'd do it and I will."

"And get nuggets for it?"

"Yes."

"All right, I'll go."

She sat up, rosy, disheveled, her hair hanging in a tousled mop from its loosened pins. Catching Lorry's hand, she squeezed it, looking up at her like an affectionate, drowsy child.

"Dear little Blessed Damozel, I love you a lot even though you are high-minded and think I'm a snob."

She had been in her room for some minutes, Lorry already in bed with a light at her elbow and a book in her hand, when she reappeared in the doorway. The pins were gone from her hair and it lay in a yellow tangle on her shoulders, bare and milk-white. Looking at her sister with round, shocked eyes, she said:

"It's just come to me how awful it is that two young, beautiful and aristocratic ladies should have to hunt so hard for nuggets. It's tragic, Lorry. It's scandalous," and she disappeared.

Lorry couldn't read after that. She put out the light and made plans in the dark.

The next day she rose, grimly determined, and girded herself for action. In the morning, giving Fong the orders, she told him she was going to have a dinner, and in the afternoon went to see Mrs. Kirkham.

Mrs. Kirkham had once been a friend of Minnie Alston's and she was the only one of that now diminishing group with whom Lorry felt at ease. Had the others known of the visit and its cause they would have thrown up their hands and said, "Just like that girl." Mrs. Kirkham was nobody now, the last person to go to for help in social matters. In the old days in Nevada her husband had been George Alston's paymaster, and she had held her head high and worn diamonds.

But that was ages ago. Long before the date of this story the high head had been lowered and the diamonds sold, all but those that encircled the miniature of her only baby, dead before the Con-Virginia slump. She lived in a little flat up toward the cemeteries, second floor, door to the left, and please press the push button. In her small parlor the pictures of the Bonanza Kings hung on the walls and she was wont, an old rheumatic figure in shiny black with the miniature pinned at her withered throat, to point to these and tell stories of the great Iliad of the Comstock.

She was very fond of Lorry and when she heard her predicament—a party to be given and not enough men—patted her hand and nodded understandingly. Times were changed—ah, if the girls had been in Virginia in the seventies! And after a brisk canter through her memories (she always had to have that) galloped back into the present and its needs. Lorry went home reassured and soothed. You could always count on Mrs. Kirkham's taking hold and helping you through.

The old lady was put on her mettle, flattered by the appeal, made to feel she was still a living force. Also she would have done anything in the world for Minnie's girls. She consulted with her niece, well married and socially aspiring if not yet installed in the citadel. It was a happy thought; the niece had the very thing, "a delightful gentleman," lately arrived in the city. So it fell out that Boye Mayer, under the chaperonage of Mrs. Kirkham, was brought to call and asked to fill a seat at the formidable dinner.

Formidable was hardly a strong enough word. It advanced on Lorry like a darkling doom. Once she had set its machinery in motion it seemed to rush forward with a vengeful momentum. Everybody accepted but Charlie Crowder, who could not get off, and Mark Burrage, who wrote her a short, stiff note saying he "was unable to attend." For a space that made her oblivious to the larger, surrounding distress. It was a little private and particular sting for herself that concentrated her thoughts upon the hurt it left. After she read it her face had flushed, and she had dropped it into her desk snapping the lid down hard. If he didn't want to come he could stay away. Men didn't like her anyway; she knew it and she wasn't going to make any mistakes. Her concern in life was Chrystie and it was being pointed out to her that she wasn't supposed to have any other.

Finally the evening came and everything was ready. Fong's talents, after years of disuse, rose in the passion of the artist and produced a feast worthy of the past. A florist decorated the table and the lower floor. Mother's jewels were taken out of the safety deposit box, and Lorry and Chrystie, in French costumes with their hair dressed so that they looked like strangers, gazed upon each other in the embowered drawing-room realizing that they had brought it upon themselves and must see it through.

The start was far from promising; none of them seemed able to live up to it. Aunt Ellen kept following the strange waiters with suspicious eyes, then looking down the glittering table at Lorry like a worried dog. And Chrystie, who had been all blithe expectation up to the time she dressed, was suddenly shattered by nervousness, making detached, breathless remarks about the weather and then drinking copious draughts of water. As for Lorry, she felt herself so small and shriveled that her new dress hung on her in folds and her mouth was so dry she could hardly articulate.

It was awful. The guests seemed to feel the blight and wither under it, eating carefully as if fearing sounds of mastication might intrude on the long, recurring silences. There was a time when Lorry thought she couldn't bear it, had a distracted temptation to leap to her feet, say she was faint and rush from the place. Then came the turn in the tide—Mr. Mayer, the strange man Mrs. Kirkham had produced, did it. She had noticed that he alone seemed free from the prevailing discomfort, looked undisturbed and calm, glancing at the table, the guests, herself and Chrystie. But it was not until the fish that he started to talk. It was about the fish, but it branched away from the fish, radiated out from it to other fish, to the waters where the other fish swam, to the countries that gave on the waters, to the people who lived in the countries.

He woke them all up, held them entranced. Lorry couldn't be sure whether he really was so clever or seemed so by contrast with them, but she thought it was the latter. It didn't matter; nothing mattered except that he was making it go. And at first she had been loath to ask him! She hadn't liked him, thought he was too suavely elaborate, a sort of overdone imitation. Well, thank goodness she had, for he simply took the dinner which was settling down to a slow, sure death and made it come to life.

Presently they were all talking, to their partners, across the table, even to Aunt Ellen. The exhilarating sound of voices rose to a hum, then a concerted babble broken by laughter. It grew animated, it grew sparkling, it grew brilliant. Chrystie, with parted lips and glistening eyes, became as artlessly amusing as she was in the bosom of her family. She was delightful, her frank enjoyment a charming spectacle. Lorry, in that seat which so short a time before had seemed but one remove from the electric chair, now reigned as from a throne, proudly surveying the splendors of her table and the gladness of her guests.

When it was over, the last carriage wheels rumbling down the street, the girls stood in the hall and looked at one another. Aunt Ellen, creaking in her new silks, toiled up the stairs, an old, shaky hand on the balustrade.

"Come up, girls," she quavered; "you must be dead tired."

"Well," breathed Lorry with questioning eyes on her sister, "how was it?"

Chrystie jumped at her and folded her in a rapturous embrace.

"Oh, it was maddening, blissful, rip-roarious! Oh, Lorry, it was the grandest thing since the water came up to Montgomery street!"

"You did enjoy it, didn't you?"

"Enjoy it! Why, I never had such a galumptious time in my life. They all did. The Barlow girls are on their heads about it—they said so and I saw it."

"I think everybody had a good time."

"Of course they did. But, oh, didn't you nearly die at the beginning? I was sick. Honestly, Lorry, I felt something sinking in me down here, and my mouth getting all sideways. If it hadn't been for that man I'd have just slipped out of my seat under the table and died there at their feet."

"He saved it," said Lorry solemnly, as one might mention a doctor who had brought back from death a beloved relative.

The gas was out and they were mounting the stairs, arms entwined, warm young flesh on warm young flesh.

"Isn't he a thoroughbred, isn't he a gem!" Chrystie chanted. "I'd like to go to Mrs. Kirkham's tomorrow, climb up her front stairs on my knees and knock my forehead on the sill of her parlor door."

"Did you really like him? I think he's clever and entertaining but I wouldn't want him for a friend."

"I didn't think about him that way. I just sort of stood off and admired. He's the most magnetic thing!"

"Yes, I suppose he is, but—"

"There are no buts about it." Then in the voice of knowledge, "I'll tell you what he is, I'll put it in terms you can understand—he's the perfect specimen of the real, genuine, solid gold nugget."



CHAPTER XII

A KISS

After the dinner Mayer walked downtown. He had been a good deal surprised, rather amused, and in the drawing-room afterward extremely bored. His amusement was sardonic. He grinned at the thought of himself in such company and wondered if it could have happened anywhere but California. Those two girls, rich and young, were apparently free to ask anybody into their house. It was curious, and he saw them similarly placed in Europe; they would have been guarded like the royal treasure, chiefly to keep such men as himself out.

The splendor of the entertainment had surprised him. He was becoming used to the Californian's prodigal display of flowers, but such a dinner, served to unappreciative youth, was something new. The whole affair had been a combination of an intelligent luxury and a rank crudity—food fit for kings set before boys and girls who had no more appreciation of its excellence than babies would have had. And the silver on the table, cumbrously magnificent, it was worth a small fortune.

Outside the humor of his own presence there, he had found the affair tedious, especially that last hour in the drawing-room. It was the sort of place that had always bored him even when he was young, governed by narrow, feminine standards, breathing a ponderous respectability from every curtain fold. Neither of the girls had been attractive. The elder, the small, pale one, was a prim, stiff little thing. The other was nothing but a gawky child; fine coloring—these Californians all had it—but with no charm or mystery. They were like the fruit, all run to size but without much flavor. He thought the elder girl had some intelligence; one would have to be on one's guard with her. He made a mental note of it, for he intended going there again—it was the best meal he had eaten since he left New York.

The night was warm and soft, a moon rising over the housetops. He breathed deep of the balmy air, inhaling it gratefully. After such a constrained three hours he felt the need of relaxation, of easy surroundings, of an expansion to his accustomed dimensions. Swinging down the steep street between the dark gardens and flanking walls, he surveyed the lights of the city's livelier center and thought of something to do that would take the curse of the dinner off his spirit.

A half hour later Pancha, emerging from the alley that led to the Albion's stage door, saw a tall, familiar shape approach from the shadows. Her heart gave a jump, and as her hand was enfolded in a strong, possessive grasp, she could not control the sudden quickening of her breath.

"Oh, it's you! Gee, how you scared me," she said, to account for it.

He squeezed the hand, murmuring apologies, his vanity gratified, for he knew no man at the stage door would ever scare Pancha.

As it was so fine a night he suggested that she walk back to the hotel and let him escort her, to which, with a glance at the moon, and a sniff of the mellow air, she agreed.

So they fared forth, two dark figures, choosing quieter streets than those she usually trod, the tapping of her high heels falling with a smart regularity on the stillness held between the silver-washed walls.

They were rather silent, conversation broken by periods when their mingled footfalls beat clear on the large, enfolding mutter of the city sinking to sleep. It was his fault; heretofore he had been the leader, conducting her by a crafty discursiveness toward those confidences she so resolutely withheld. But tonight he did not want to talk, trailing lazy steps beside her, casting thoughtful glances upward at the vast, illumined sky. It made her nervous; there was something of a deep, disturbing intimacy about it; not a sweet and soothing intimacy, but portentous and agitating. She tried to be herself, laid about for bright things to say and found she could pump up no defiant buoyancy, her tongue clogged, her spirit oppressed by a disintegrating inner distress. It did not make matters any better when he said in a dreamy tone:

"Why are you so quiet?"

"I've worked hard tonight. I'm tired and you're walking so fast."

He was immediately contrite, slackening his step, which in truth was very slow.

"Oh, Pancha, what a brute I am. Why didn't you tell me?" And he took her hand and tried to draw it through his arm.

But she resisted, pulling away from him almost pettishly, shrinking from his touch.

"No, no, let me alone. I like to walk by myself."

He drew back with a slight shrug, more amused than repulsed. Nevertheless he was rather sorry he had suggested the walk, he had never known her to be less entertaining.

"Always proud, always independent, always keeping her guard up." He cast a questioning side glance at her face, grave and pale by his shoulder. "You wild thing, can no one tame you?"

"Why do you say I'm wild?"

"Because you are. How long have I known you? Since early in September and I don't get any nearer. You still keep me guessing."

"About what?"

"About what?" He leaned down and spied at her profile. "About yourself."

"Oh, me!"

"Yes, you—what else? You're the most secretive little sphinx outside Egypt."

She did not answer for a moment. She had been secretive, but it was about the humble surroundings of her youth, those ignominious beginnings of hers. Of this she could not bring herself to tell, fearful that it would lower her in his esteem. She saw him, hearing of the Buon Gusto restaurant and the life along the desert, withdrawing from her in shocked repugnance. About other things—the stage, the lovers—she had been frank, almost confidential.

"I don't see why you say that," she protested; "I've told you any amount of stuff."

"But not everything. You know that, Pancha."

He was now so keen, like a dog with its nose to the scent, that he forgot her recent refusal and hooked his hand inside her arm. This time she did not draw away and they walked on, close-linked, alone in the moonlit street. Conscious of her reticences, ashamed of her lack of candor, and yet afraid to make damaging revelations, she said defensively:

"I've told you as much as I want to tell."

He seized on that, in his eagerness pressing her arm against his side, bending over her like a lover.

"Yes, but not all. And why not all? Why should you keep anything from me?"

"But why should I tell you?" she asked, her loitering step coming to a stop.

As the situation stood the question was a poser. He did not want to be her lover, had never intended it; his easy gallantry had meant nothing. But now, seeing her averted face, the eyes down-drooped, he could think of no reply that was not love-making. She stole a swift look at him, recognized his hesitation, and felt a stab, for it was the love-making answer she had expected. The mortified anger of the woman who has made a bid for tenderness and seen herself mistaken surged up in her.

She jerked her arm violently out of his grasp and walked forward at a swinging pace.

"What's the matter?" he said, chasing at her heels. "Are you angry?"

"I shouldn't wonder," she threw over her shoulder. "Being nagged at for fun doesn't appeal to me."

"But what do you mean?—I'm all at sea."