mpensate her for
the wreck of her personal life. It might take a lifetime, but what of
that if she succeeded in the end?

She took long walks daily; alone, for the French maid had been dismissed
long since. The walks were not pleasant, for when the sand from the
outlying dunes was not swept through the city by the bitter trades, the
fog was crawling into one's very marrow. And the hills were steep.
Sometimes she took the cable car to the end of the line, then walked to
the Presidio; but that brought the sand-hills nearer, and she went home
with smarting eyes. Protected by her window, she found beauty even in
the summer mood of San Francisco; and sometimes she went up into the
tower of the Belmont house and watched the long clouds of dust roll
symmetrically down the streets of the city's valleys; or the delicate
white mist ride through the Golden Gate to wreathe itself about the
cross on Calvary, then creep down the bare brown cone to press close
about the tombs on Lone Mountain; then onward until all the city was
gone under a white swinging ocean; except the points of the hills
disfigured with the excrescences of the rich. Into the canons and rifts
of the hills beyond the blue bay the fog crept daintily at first,
hanging in festoons so light that the very trades held aloof, then
advancing with a rush,--a phantom of the booming ocean whence it came.

And Trennahan? He made no sign. Whether he were dead or alive, the
victim or the captor of his old familiars, careless, or nursing an open
wound, Magdalena was miserably ignorant. The time had come when she
waited tensely as mails were due, feeling that an empty envelope covered
with his handwriting would give her solace. She cherished no hope that
he would ever return to her, but he had promised her his lasting
friendship. Sometimes she wondered at the cruelty of men. Why should he
not help her? Even if he really believed in the extinction of her love,
he might guess that she needed his friendship. She had yet to learn that
the one thing that man never gives to woman is spiritual help.

Helena wrote that her father was so anxious for her to marry Alan Rush
that she was officially engaged to that much-enduring youth and really
liked him. Menlo Park was the same as ever; not so gay as last year, but
the same in quality. No one had called on the lessees of Fair Oaks. They
were new people whom nobody knew, and it would be horrid to go there,
anyhow. Caro was engaged to marry