tiny village of Menlo
Park. On the opposite side of the track was a row of high closely knit
trees which shut the Folsom place from the passing eye. Caro, under a
big pink sunshade, had walked over to chat with her friends and escort
her visitors home.

The train rolled in and discharged its favoured few. The wait was short,
and Mr. Geary was still mounting the steps of his char-a-banc when
Magdalena sat forward with a faint exclamation. The smoking-car was
slowly passing. Four hats at four consecutive windows were raised as
they drifted past. They were the hats of Alan Rush, Eugene Fort, Carter
Howard, and "Dolly" Webster.

XXIV

The Yorba house on Nob Hill was the gloomiest house in San Francisco in
any circumstances; upon the return of the family to town this year it
suggested a convent of perpetual silence. Mrs. Yorba, bereft of her full
corps of servants, herself shook the curtains free of their loops and
pinned them together. "Ah Kee can play the hose on the windows from the
outside once a month," she remarked to her daughter; "but Heaven only
knows when they will be washed inside again, or how often poor Ah Kee
will have time to sweep the rooms. I shall make an attempt to keep the
reception-room in some sort of order; and as it is comparatively small
and I can dust it myself, I may succeed, but I don't suppose anyone will
ever enter the parlours again. There seems no hope of your father coming
to his senses."

Magdalena flung her own curtains wide, determined to have light if she
had to wash the windows herself. But the rest of the house chilled and
oppressed her. Even her mother's bedroom was half-lighted, and the halls
and rooms downstairs were echoing vaults. One was almost afraid to break
the silence; even the soft-footed Chinaman walked on his toes. Magdalena
conceived the whimsical idea that her father's house had been closed to
receive all the family skeletons of San Francisco, of which many
whispers had come to her. Sometimes she fancied that she heard their
bones rattling at night, as they crowded together, muttering their
terrible secrets. But the idea only amused her; it did not make her
morbid, although there was little but her own will to keep her spirits
on a plane where there was more light than bog. It was a very grey and
rainy winter. She was forced to spend the afternoons after four o'clock
in idleness: Don Roberto himself turned off the gas every morning before
he went down town, a