cause of Dick's divorcing me. He actually went East to settle up some
property he had left him there, and he's coming on the steamer."

"Louis Sylvester!" repeated Reddy, staring at her. "Why, he was a bigger
fool than I was, and a worse man!" he added bitterly.

"I believe he was," said the lady, smiling, "and I think he still
is. But," she added, glancing at Reddy under her light fringed lids,
"you--you're regularly reformed, aren't you? You're stouter, too, and
altogether more solid and commercial looking. Yet who'd have thought of
your keeping a hotel or ever doing anything but speculate in wild-cat
or play at draw poker. How did you drift into it? Come, tell me! I'm not
Mrs. Sylvester just yet, and maybe I might like to go into the business
too. You don't want a partner, do you?"

Her manner was light and irresponsible, or rather it suggested a
childlike putting of all responsibility for her actions upon others,
which he remembered now too well. Perhaps it was this which kept him
from observing that the corners of her smiling lips, however, twitched
slightly, and that her fingers, twisting the threads of the tassel,
were occasionally stiffened nervously. For he burst out: Oh yes; he had
drifted into it when it was a toss up if it wasn't his body instead
that would be found drifting out to sea from the first wharf of San
Francisco. Yes, he had been a common laborer,--a farm hand, in those
fields she had passed,--a waiter in the farm kitchen, and but for luck
he might be taking her orders now in this very hotel. It was not her
fault if he was not in the gutter.

She raised her thin hand with a tired gesture as if to ward off the
onset of his words. "The same old Jim," she repeated; "and yet I thought