ten years
agone.

Gwynne had discovered at Capheaton that one of his cousin's charms was
her absence of effort in conversation and a corresponding indifference
to effort in others. They did not exchange a syllable as they sped up
the wider expanse of the bay east of the Islands, and he watched the
hills and mountains close on his left, with their bright little towns
and sombre depths of forest. Many of the rounded cones of the foothills
were bare, and so was the rocky crest of Tamalpais, but the old redwoods
still held triumphant possession of several of the slopes and all of the
canyons. Here and there factories and warehouses marred the almost
primeval beauty of the scene, but to-day at least there was no smoke to
cobweb the radiant sky. Even the Chinese shrimp-pickers were lounging on
the beach before their little shack village.

They passed the last of the towns. Towers and sharp roofs rose above the
mass of cultivated trees in some private park; the trees a motley
collection of pines and palms, eucalyptus and oak, madrono, laurel,
locust, and acacia. The gardens were full of children and birds. On the
roads horses in old-fashioned buggies danced at automobiles whizzing by.
In the yachts even the men had laid aside their keen anxious look--as
peculiar to the young San Franciscan of business as to the New-Yorker or
Westerner--and were bent upon absolute relaxation for the day. One
millionaire was alone in his big luxurious launch, a broad grin on his
homely ingenuous countenance, and even his mouth open to inhale the
clean and sparkling air. His hands were clasped on his curves.

"He inherited," said Isabel, in reply to Gwynne's comment that he did
not look as if he ever expended his energies in the piling of dollars.
"And he doesn't want any more. But they all look well enough. It is not
only the climate but the cooking."

They left San Francisco Bay and Isabel steered more carefully: the
channel in the Bay of San Pablo is narrow and the current treacherous.
When they reached the drawbridge they were not only alone on the wide
silvery expanse of water, but there was scarcely a country-house to
break the wild loneliness of mountain and canyon. After they entered
Rosewater Creek the mountains with their broken and multiplying ridges
were more imposing still, and before long another range began to taper
northward on the opposite shore. They were in the great tidal marsh now,
green, where all the rest of the world