"If I can
once cross the bridge!"

CHAPTER XVI

On a certain evening in February Fred Starratt, from the upper deck of
a ferryboat, again saw the dusky outlines of San Francisco stretch
themselves in faint allurement pricked with glittering splendor. It
was a mild night--the skies clear, the air tinged with pleasant chill,
the bay stilled to nocturnal quiet.

He had come out upon the upper deck to be alone. He wanted to approach
the city of his birth in decent solitude, to feel the thrill of
home-coming in all its poignant melancholy. He had expected the event
to assume a special significance, to be fraught with hidden meaning,
to set his pulses leaping. But he had to confess that neither the
beauty of the night nor the uncommon quality of the event moved him.
Had he been wrung dry of all emotional reaction? It was not until a
woman came from the stuffy cabin and took a seat in a sheltered corner
outside that he had the slightest realization of the nearness of his
old environment. As she passed close to his pacing form a sickly sweet
odor enveloped him. He looked after her retreating figure. She was
carrying a yellow armful of blossoming acacia. The perfume evoked a
sad memory of virginal springs innumerable ... springs that seemed to
go back wistfully beyond his own existence ... springs long dead and
never to be revived. Dead? No, perhaps not quite that, but springs
never to be again his portion. This perfume of the blossoming acacia
... how in the old days it had always brought home a sense of
awakening, a sense of renewal to a land burned and seared and ravished
in the hot and tearless passion of summer! Following the first rains
would come the faint flush of green upon the hillsides, growing a
little deeper as the healing floods released themselves, and then, one
day, suddenly, almost overnight, the acacia would bend beneath a
yellow burden, sending a swooning fragrance out to match the yellow
sunlight of February. From that moment on the pageant was continuous,
bud and blossom and virginal leaf succeeding one another in showering
abundance. But nothing that followed quite matched the heavy beauty of
these first golden boughs, nothing that could evoke quite the same
infinite yearning for hidden and heroic destinies. He defined the
spell of the perfume again, but he did not feel it. It shook his
memory to its foundations, but it left his senses cold. And the city
before him was as sharply revealed and a