activity. Once, at the corner of two sharply
converging streets, she passed a house whose lighted windows were open,
for the wind had gone and the night was hot. But she only stood for a
moment. Fat Mexican women half dressed were lolling about, and the front
door was open to many men. The women were not as evil appearing as the
French dregs of Dupont Street, possibly because they wore flowers in
their hair and looked more frankly sensual and less commercial. Again
Magdalena felt an almost irresistible attraction, but hastened on. Once,
in a dark street, she was flung against a wall and her pockets turned
inside out, but she made no protest and was allowed to go without
further indignity. It was a woman who had robbed her, and Magdalena,
having come off with the mere loss of seventy cents, indulged in a
pleasurable thrill of adventure.

After a time she found herself climbing a steep hill and felt a sudden
desire to reach the top, and that the climb should be a long one. Here
and there she passed a tumble-down house, but the rest of the hill under
the brilliant moon showed bare and brown. From the other side came the
sound of lapping waves, and she knew herself to be on Telegraph Hill.

She reached the top and sat down on the ground. The clouds had flown
with the wind, and the moon revealed the quiet bay and the black masses
of cliff and hill and mountain beyond. An occasional gust made a loud
clatter in the rigging of the many crafts below, or an angry shout arose
from the water-front; but otherwise the night from the summit of
Telegraph Hill was peaceful and most beautiful.

Magdalena, who loved Nature and had yielded to its influence many times
in her life, made a deliberate attempt to absorb the peace and beauty of
the night into her own scarred and troubled soul. But she gave up the
attempt in a few moments. The fierceness of her mood had passed, and
some of its blackness, but she was still bitter and hopeless. There was
nothing to do but to face the problem of her life, and thinking was
easier on these altitudes, where the air was fresh and salt, and the
stars seemed close, than in the ill-ventilated prison which she called
her home. She determined to remain until morning and to restore her
brain to its normal condition, if possible.

She looked back upon the mental and moral inertia into which she had
sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal
instinct, with terror and horror. Befor