s his. Thompson was no longer uncertain. He was suddenly,
acutely unhappy. The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were
walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.

Sophie got into the machine. The red roadster slid off with gears
singing their metallic song as she shifted through to high. Thompson
watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past
all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a
book. He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk
the streets in aimless, restless fashion, full of vivid, painful
memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so
long dormant he had supposed them dead.

Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the
enjoyment of her good fortune. Yet there was no reason why she should
not be here. Thompson damned under his breath the blind chance which had
set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.

But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter? In a city of
half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose
and she God only knew where. That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes
she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize
as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is
impregnable--these things served to intensify the gulf between them
which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened. No,
Sophie Carr's presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any
difference to him. He repeated this emphatically--with rather more
emphasis than seemed necessary.

CHAPTER XVI

A MEETING BY THE WAY

But he found it did make a difference, a profoundly disturbing
difference. He had grown insulated against the memory of Sophie Carr
tugging at his heartstrings as the magnetic north pulls on the compass
needle. He had grown free of both thought and hope of her. There had
been too many other vital things pressing upon him these months of
adventure in toil, too many undeniable, everyday factors of living
present at every turn, hourly insistent upon being coped with, for him
to nurse old sad dreams and longings. So he had come at last to think of
that passionate yearning as a disease which had run its course.

Now, to his dismay, it recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere
glimpse of Sophie. The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon
him, to make his heart heavy and