's burdens as a matter of course. The men
were bent almost double with increasing properties.

Isabel felt neither pity nor admiration for them; they were a mere unit,
these thousands reduced to their primal component, the third fact in the
great day of facts.

Suddenly, however, she caught sight of Lyster Stone. He carried a baby
on one arm and several rolls of painted canvas under the other. Beside
him walked the mother pushing a loaded crib; and behind him the artist
friend, to whose aid he had evidently gone, dragged a large canvas trunk
bound with an ingenious system of ropes. Stone nodded gayly when he saw
Isabel.

"Hallo!" he cried. "I was going for you later on. We'll all sleep out
to-night. Better come along." Then as Isabel only shook her head he
said, hurriedly: "Awfully sorry I forgot--promised Gwynne I'd go up and
tell you he was in for a long day's work--transporting hospital patients
and hauling dynamite. He sent peremptory orders that you and his mother
were to go to the country with the afternoon tide."

The crowd bore him on and Isabel and Anne walked up the hill again,
meeting other streams of refugees, but thinner, as most of them
preferred the easier slopes. Isabel looked at Anne curiously. There was
an unusual restlessness about her, nothing of the rudimentary expression
of the crowd. Isabel was wondering if her apparent and unusual spirits
might be due to the fact that her flat was in the Western Addition, and
that she had hired a wagon at the first alarm of fire and carried her
silver to the Presidio, when Anne suddenly began to explain herself.

"Do you know," she broke out, "I have a wonderful sense of
freedom!--of--of--hope. Something has happened at last. All the ruts
have been ploughed over. Life will never be the same here, in my time at
least. It will be like beginning all over again, with a hundred barely
imagined possibilities and an equal chance for every one. It may be a
reprehensible thing--to feel as if the destruction of your city had set
your individual soul free--but I do, and that's the end of it. And I can
tell you I've seen that _expression_ in the eyes of many a man in the
last few hours. Not in those of the older men, perhaps, for they wear
out early enough in this climate, anyhow, and those that are close upon
sixty don't look as if they had much left to live for--although I've
seen a few flying about as if they had dropped thirty years; its all a
matter of temperament