e forgotten, is one of the sure points upon which
I have reckoned. Have I your promise?"

"My oath!" she said, flippantly; and although she was not generous
enough to admire, and still felt as if the world itself were a corpse,
every inherited instinct in her united in a visible respect for a poise
that was a gift of the centuries, not a deftly manufactured mask.

She rang the bell and extended her hand. Gwynne shook it politely; and a
moment later was walking down Park Lane in that singular state of
elation that in mercurial natures succeeds one of the brutal blows of
life, when all the forces of the spirit have leaped to the rescue.

PART II

1905

I

For Isabel Otis the _genius loci_ had a more powerful and enduring
magnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt the
consolation of it, although without analysis, in her lonely girlhood by
the great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, in
Munich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perched
and low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had never
heard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But no
place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious
criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her
being, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of it
clustered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordial
neighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; long
rides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in the
swift cable cars; and certain candy stores on Polk and Kearney streets.
At long intervals there was a children's party at one of the fine houses
on the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where an
always migratory people were rivalling the splendors of Nob Hill--as
that craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hill
into their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories of
her mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under her
rain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of the
old-fashioned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girls
good-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage at
the foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad to
bury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel had
never so much as a glimpse of San Franc