door of her parlor she invited him to enter.

He hesitated a moment. Nothing was farther from his intention than
to permit his interest in this charming lonely woman to deepen;
entanglements had proved fatal before to ambitious men; moreover he
was almost an intimate friend of her husband. But he had no
reasonable excuse, he had manifestly been sauntering when they met,
and he had all the fine courtesy of the South. He followed her into
the hotel parlor she had made unlike any other room in San Francisco,
with the delicate French furniture and hangings her mother had bought
in Paris and given her as a wedding present. A log fire was blazing.
She waved her hand toward an easy chair beside the hearth, threw
aside her hat and lifted her shining crushed hair with both hands,
then ran over to a panelled chest which the doctor had conceded to be
handsome, but quite useless as it was not even lined with cedar.

"I keep them in here," she exclaimed as gleefully as a naughty
child; and he had the uneasy sense of sharing a secret with her that
isolated them on a little oasis of their own in this lawless waste of
San Francisco.

She had opened the chest and was rummaging.

"What shall it be first? How I have longed to talk with you about a
dozen. On the whole I think I'd rather you'd read a poem to me. Do
you mind? I know you are not lazy--oh, no!--and I am sure you read
delightfully."

"I don't mind in the least," he said gallantly. (At all events he
was in for it.) "And I rather like the sound of my own voice. What