well. The day's cooling in."

"It's not Morgansen," announced Engelbaum. "A new man--thinnish--Oh,
yes, but an inspector. You can tell these scientific men by their
cut."

"Hope they haven't sacked old Morgansen," said the first idler.
"He's been a bit of a scandal, these three years. But he knows about
bananas more'n a banana would own to, even with a blush."

Half-way over the hill, on a packing-case in a bare veranda, sat a
man who for three months had avoided the hotel and these loungers,
and been given up by all of them (by some enviously) as a lost
friend. A woman reclined--good old novelists' word--in a sort of
deck-chair three paces away. The windows of the house stood wide,
and showed rooms within carpetless, matless, swept if not garnished,
with other packing-cases stacked about and labelled. There was even
a label on the chair in which the woman reclined: but her skirt hid
it.

When the whistle of the fruit-steamer had first sounded, out beyond
the Point, and almost before the alert young population of San Ramon
could tear down the pathway beside the bungalow's discreet garden,
she had risen with a catch of the breath, taken up a pair of
field-glasses and scanned the offing.

"It is she beyond a doubt," she had announced.

"What other could it be?" the man had answered, pretty lazily.
"And that being so--"

Said the woman--I am trying to tell this in correct fashion--"Why are
you so dull?--who, when the boat used to call, would snatch up the
glasses and be no company for anyone until you had counted everything
she discharged."

Farrell--oh! by the way it's about time I told you that the man was
Farrell--Farrell looked at the woman. Farrell said:

No, the devil! I can't tell it the professional way, after all.
There's the woman. Well, the woman was young, and fair to see, dark,
well-bred, with a tinge of lemon, and descended pretty straight from
the Incas--"instead of which" she preferred to call herself Mrs.
M'Kay or M'Kie, having been caught and married in an unguarded moment
by someone who had arrived in San Ramon to push a new brand of whisky
and stayed to push it the wrong way. Since M'Kie's death--or
M'Kay's--whichever it was--new-comers had to choose between
Engelbaum's, on the summit, and the lady, an heiress in a small way,
who played the guitar, half-way down the hill, but frowned on the
drinking-habit.

Farrell, you will perceive, had chosen the better way, and had become