* * * *

The afternoon fog, forerunner of another rain, floated in lances above
Montgomery Street. The interior valleys had felt their first touch of
baking summer, had issued their first call on their cooling plant--the
Golden Gate, funnel for mist and rain-winds. The moisture fell in
sleety drops; yet only the stranger and pilgrim took protection of
raincoat or umbrella. The native knew well enough that it would go no
further. On these afternoons, neither cold nor hot, wet nor wholly
dry, the blood is champagne and the heart a dancing-floor.

At the moment when Eleanor stepped out into the home-going crowd, she,
an instrument tuned to catch delicate vibrations from earth and sea
and air, felt all this exhilaration. Life was right; the future was
right; the display of a young female creature before the male--that
most of all was right. And Bertram Chester, talking for the moment
like his old, natural self, was a main eddy in the currents of
joy-in-youth.

"You are bonny to-day!" she said quite naturally as she looked him
over.

He blushed happily. And the blush helped restore him in her eyes as
the natural Bertram Chester.

"And you're the bonniest of the bonny. I never saw you look so full of
ginger except--" he hesitated there, and her words rushed in to meet
the emergency.

"Thank you! Though I wasn't fishing, I am grateful just the same."

"Then you do find something now and then that you can stand for in
me?"

"I find a great deal--when you are Bert Chester." He seemed to puzzle
over this, to ponder it; so that she added:

"Let's not talk conundrums in this air and this crowd! We're not
blue-nosed, self-searching New Englanders. Let's keep away from Market
Street and walk through the Quarter. They haven't yet taken the
Easter things from the shop windows, and there's a darling atrocious
group of statuary next door to The Fior d'Italia which you must see!"
And then, as they turned the corner--

"What's the crowd? I'm for disremembering that I'm refined. I want to
be curious!"

"Looks like a scrap--do you--"

"Nonsense! Come on. I divide women into those who would like to see a
prize fight and admit it, and those who would like to see a prize
fight and deny it!"

"Gee whiz!" said Bertram. They had reached the edge of the crowd,
which circled about some knot of violent struggle and gesture. "Excuse
me!" He had sprung from her side and was breaking his way through. By
instinct