ome with another spasm of delight, and vowed
that not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five or
six days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which had
grown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons that
counted in her flourishing community. But in time she would live more
and more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco,
drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once a
week, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, even
in rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned on
Rincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who had
been the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time when
Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The Three
Macs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era of
which they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been no
mean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spirit
on the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For a
time it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than his
famous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million;
but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in the
aggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six months
later, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave his
only child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generously
supplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She was
thirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, she
spent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then she
returned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. Colonel
Belmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it would
have multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far more
about spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left to
commemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmont
but the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after his
marriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it,
for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, and
complacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.

That part of Russian Hi