erself again, but in reality very nervous, the result, no
doubt, of her illness, and of the prolonged stress of business. However,
she had finally succeeded in letting the Abbey and Capheaton to
advantage, and it was on the cards that she would reach California
before the end of the year. Isabel hoped that, unfed by her son's
exacting presence the maternal fires burned low; she had a clearly
defined intention to be a factor in the new career of Elton Gwynne, and
no desire for the capricious interference of his mother.

II

As Isabel stood in her little porch that brilliant September morning,
she dismissed her occasional regret that she had not remained in England
for a London season. Not only had she put the time to better use on her
ranch, but no doubt her agent would have relet this house, and delayed
the fulfilment of one of those dreams upon which she unconsciously fed
her soul. The shrieking trade-winds and the dense white fogs were
hibernating somewhere out in the Pacific. All the city, in the great
irregular amphitheatre below, was sharply outlined in the yellow light;
Isabel wondered if the sun renewed its stores from the golden veins to
north and south. On the wide broken ledge just beneath her pinnacle was
the concrete evidence of an architectural orgy to be seen nowhere else
on earth: wooden mansions with the pure outlines of the Renaissance; a
Gothic palace with bow-windows, also of wood; a big brown-stone house in
the style of New York; piles of shingles and stones; here and there a
touch of Romanesque, later French, and Italian; the majority of those
plutocratic and perishable masses, of no style in particular, unless it
were that of Mansard combined with the criminalities of him who invented
the bow-window and the irrelevant tower. On the slopes were a few old
houses in gardens, some with cottage roofs, others square, brown, dusty,
melancholy. But the majority were of the "house in a row" type,
radiating in all directions from the "boarding-house blocks" on the
lower slopes. Then, down on the plain, came the big compact masses of
stone and concrete, brick and steel, devoted to business and housing of
the itinerant. The lofty domes of the City Hall and a newspaper
building, a few church spires and the great white-stone hotel on a crest
not far from Isabel's, were the sole pretenders to architectural beauty
within her ken.

Far away she could make out the Mission Church, once called after St.
Fra