we'll none
of us have so long to wait for large returns."

"I am afraid of fires," said Isabel, dubiously. "The most vivid memories
of my childhood are standing at my window on the Hill in my night-gown
and watching whole blocks down here in flames. The wonder is that yours
have never gone. Now I get my ground rent, no matter what happens." But
before she had finished speaking she had made a sudden movement towards
Gwynne. "I will do it," she said. "It will be better--all round."

"Good! And I intend to put on outside shutters of asbestos, so, with
walls of concrete and steel, and as little wood inside as possible, we
should weather anything short of subterranean fires."

Then Miss Montgomery took them through South Park, the oval enclosure,
surrounded by high brown sad-looking houses looking down upon a bit of
dusty green, and pointed out the long-deserted mansions of the
Randolphs, the Hathaways, the Hunt McLanes, and of others who had
dispensed the simple lavish hospitality of the Fifties and Sixties. She
was intensely proud of the fact that her mother had been born in South
Park, and pointed with a sigh, not all unconscious affectation, to the
stiff three-storied house that had come, with so many others, "round the
Horn" in the Fifties. Beside it, looking like an old man with his arms
hanging and his jaw fallen, its windows vacant and broken, its paint
long unrenewed, and cobwebs on the very doorstep, stood the Randolph
House, the theatre of the most poignant of all an Francisco's initial
tragedies. Isabel had told Gwynne the story of Nina Randolph, and as
Anne repeated it he recalled the name of Dudley Thorpe, and remembered
that he had left the reputation of a good parliamentarian and M. F. H.

They went up to Rincon Hill, once the haughty elder sister of South
Park, now looking like a lonely island in a dirty sea covered with
wreckage. There still remained several handsome old ivy-covered
mansions, and many beautiful as well as picturesquely dilapidated
gardens. Rincon Hill had contributed two peeresses to England, Lee
Tarlton and Tiny Montgomery, and Gwynne not only knew them both, but was
the more interested, as Cecil Maundrell's sudden elevation to the
earldom of Barnstaple during his active youth had served as an
object-lesson to himself. Mrs. Montgomery's old home was in good repair,
but she was in Europe as usual, and Randolph Montgomery, now in the
diplomatic service--too independent for the machine, he