was
just the day and hour for a brisk walk, with one's hands plunged deep
in the pockets of a heavy coat, and one's hat tied snugly against the
wind. Twenty minutes of such walking, she thought longingly, would have
shaken her out of the little indefinable mood of depression that had
been hanging over her all day. She could have climbed the steep street
on which the cottage faced, and caught the freshening ocean breeze full
in her face at the corner; she could have looked down on the busy
little thoroughfares of the Chinese quarter just below, and the
swarming streets of the Italian colony beyond, and beyond that again to
the bay, dotted now with the brown sails of returning fishing smacks,
and crossed and recrossed by the white wakes of ferry-boats. For the
Warriners' cottage clung to the hill just above the busy, picturesque
foreign colonies, and the cheerful unceasing traffic of the piers. It
was in a hopelessly unfashionable part of the city now; its old,
dignified neighbors--French and Spanish houses of plaster and brick,
with deep gardens where willow and pepper trees, and fuchsias, and
great clumps of calla lilies had once flourished--were all gone,
replaced by modern apartment houses. But it had been one of the city's
show places fifty years before, when its separate parts had been
brought whole "around the Horn" from some much older city, and when
homesick pioneer wives and mothers had climbed the board-walk that led
to its gate, just to see, and perhaps to cry over, the painted china
door-knobs, the colored glass fan-light in the hall, the iron-railed
balconies, and slender, carved balustrade that took their hungry hearts
back to the decorous, dear old world they had left so far behind them.

Jimmy and Anne Warriner had stumbled upon the Jackson Street cottage
five years ago, just before their marriage, and after an ecstatic,
swift inspection of it, had raced like children to the agent, to crowd
into his willing hand a deposit on the first month's rent. Anne had
never kept house before, she had no eyes for obsolete plumbing, uneven
floors, for the dark cellar sacred to cats and rubbish. She and Jim
chattered rapturously of French windows, of brick garden walks, of how
plain little net curtains and Anne's big brass bowl full of nasturtiums
would look on the landing of the absurd little stairway that led from
the square hall to two useless little chambers above.

"Jimski--this floor oiled, and the rug laid cros