ore like the marriages that obtained among crowned
heads in the days before they were displaced by the Magnates.

[Illustration: There she was, boiling fish-chowder 153]

"And there she was, boiling fish-chowder in a soot-covered pot, her
glorious eyes inflamed by the acrid smoke of the open fire. Hers was a
sad story. She was the one survivor in a million, as I had been, as
the Chauffeur had been. On a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills,
overlooking San Francisco Bay, Van Warden had built a vast summer
palace. It was surrounded by a park of a thousand acres. When the
plague broke out, Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards patrolled the
boundaries of the park, and nothing entered in the way of provisions or
even mail matter that was not first fumigated. And yet did the plague
enter, killing the guards at their posts, the servants at their tasks,
sweeping away the whole army of retainers--or, at least, all of them who
did not flee to die elsewhere. So it was that Vesta found herself the
sole living person in the palace that had become a charnel house.

"Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants that ran away.
Returning, two months afterward, he discovered Vesta in a little summer
pavilion where there had been no deaths and where she had established
herself. He was a brute. She was afraid, and she ran away and hid among
the trees. That night, on foot, she fled into the mountains--she, whose
tender feet and delicate body had never known the bruise of stones nor
the scratch of briars. He followed, and that night he caught her. He
struck her. Do you understand? He beat her with those terrible fists of
his and made her his slave. It was she who had to gather the firewood,
build the fires, cook, and do all the degrading camp-labor--she, who had
never performed a menial act in her life. These things he compelled her
to do, while he, a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look
on. He did nothing, absolutely nothing, except on occasion to hunt meat
or catch fish."

"Good for Chauffeur," Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to the other
boys. "I remember him before he died. He was a corker. But he did
things, and he made things go. You know, Dad married his daughter, an'
you ought to see the way he knocked the spots outa Dad. The Chauffeur
was a son-of-a-gun. He made us kids stand around. Even when he was
croaking he reached out for me, once, an' laid my head open with that
long stick he kept always beside him