retain--was the
only spot of light in the rather sombre room: it was all white muslin
and bright crimson silk. There was an old-fashioned settle against the
wall and three stiff chairs. Gwynne liked the room, and had a vague
feeling that he knew Isabel a little better. Certainly it expressed a
side of her of which he had caught but an occasional glimpse.

He pulled the curtains apart and shading his eyes from the light of the
room looked down towards the city. It had vanished under a sea of white
fog that broke against the ledge of Nob Hill. A cable-car might have
been a comet flashing along the edge of a void.

"I wonder," he said, "I wonder--should San Francisco disappear--be
burned by that fire you are always expecting--or if the bay should
shoal, or the Golden Gate rush together, so that she would have no
reason for existence, and gradually be devoured by time--I suppose the
fog and the winds would still be faithful. I can imagine the fogs
rolling in and embracing her, and the winds raging about every forgotten
corner, centuries after there was anybody left to curse either."

"Was it Mrs. Kaye or Lady Cecilia Spence that said you just missed being
a poet? I hope some slumbering ancestor is not struggling for
resurrection out here. I much prefer that you should be a statesman."

"I intend to be, nor have I any desire to turn poet. I have seen too
many in London. But this city, ugly as it is, appeals in its own way to
the imagination--more, for some unknown reason, than the most poetic I
ever saw in the old worlds. There is something almost uncanny about it.
While it is raw, and crude, and practically in its infancy, it at the
same time suggests an unthinkable antiquity. Perhaps--who knows?--it had
a civilization contemporary with the Montezumas--or with Atlantis; and
it is the ghosts of old unrecorded peoples that linger and give one a
fairly haunted feeling when one climbs these hills alone at night."

"Much better you keep your hand on your pistol and your eye out for
foot-pads--and one dreamer in the family is enough. I hope I have not
infected you."

She forsook her glowing image and looked at him inquisitively. He
wandered about the room again and paused to look at a row of
daguerreotypes on a shelf, dead and forgotten Belmonts.

"You do dream a good deal," he said. "Judging by your varying styles of
beauty as well as other things, you must be possessed by a dozen
different sorts of old Johnnies trying t