d that existence there would have all the quaint originality of
Robinson Crusoe's tree-dwelling, Mr. Bly began cheerfully to mount the
steps. It should be premised that, although a recently appointed clerk
in a large banking house, Mr. Bly was somewhat youthful and
imaginative, and regarded the ascent as part of that "Excelsior"
climbing pointed out by a great poet as a praiseworthy function of
ambitious youth.

Reaching at last the level of the veranda, he turned to the view. The
distant wooded shore of Contra Costa, the tossing white-caps and
dancing sails of the bay between, and the foreground at his feet of
wharves and piers, with their reed-like jungles of masts and cordage,
made up a bright, if somewhat material, picture. To his right rose the
crest of the hill, historic and memorable as the site of the old
semaphoric telegraph, the tossing of whose gaunt arms formerly thrilled
the citizens with tidings from the sea. Turning to the house, he
recognized the prevailing style of light cottage architecture, although
incongruously confined to narrow building plots and the civic
regularity of a precise street frontage. Thus a dozen other villas,
formerly scattered over the slope, had been laboriously displaced and
moved to the rigorous parade line drawn by the street surveyor, no
matter how irregular and independent their design and structure.
Happily, the few scrub-oaks and low bushes which formed the scant
vegetation of this vast sand dune offered no obstacle and suggested no
incongruity. Beside the house before which Mr. Bly now stood, a
prolific Madeira vine, quickened by the six months' sunshine, had alone
survived the displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed
luxuriance half hid the upper veranda from his view.

Still glowing with his exertion, the young man rang the bell and was
admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and
well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him. An open piano, a
sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face
downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant rustle
of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion of refined
domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the homeless and
nomadic Bly. He was still enjoying, in half embarrassment, that vague
and indescribable atmosphere of a refined woman's habitual presence,
when the door opened and the mistress of the house formally presented
herself.

She wa