crouch close to the earth as if warding off a blow. Only the ugly dome of
the City Hall, the church steeples, and the old shot tower held up
their heads, and they had an almost terrifying sharpness of outline, of
alertness, as if ready to spring.

In that far-off district known as "South of Market Street," which she had
never entered save in a closed carriage on her way to the Southern Pacific
Station or to pay a yearly call on some old family that still dwelt on
that oasis, Rincon Hill--sole outpost of the social life of the
sixties--infrequent thin lines of smoke rose from humble chimneys. It
was the region of factories and dwellings of the working-class, but its
inhabitants were not early risers in these days of high wages and short
hours.

Even those gray spirals ascended as if the atmosphere lay heavy on them.
They accentuated the lifelessness, the petrifaction, the intense and
sinister quiet of the prostrate city.

Alexina shuddered and her volatile spirits winged their way down into those
dark and intuitive depths of her mind she had never found time to plumb.
She knew that the hour of dawn was always still, but she had never imagined
a stillness so complete, so final as this. Nor was there any fresh
lightness in the morning air. It seemed to press downward like an enormous
invisible bat; or like the shade of buried cities, vain outcroppings of
a vanished civilization, brooding menacingly over this recent flimsy
accomplishment of man that Nature could obliterate with a sneer.

Alexina, holding her breath, glanced upward. That ghost of evening's
twilight, the sad gray of dawn, had retreated, but not before the crimson
rays of sunrise. The unflecked arc above was a hard and steely blue. It