Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/191

Rh that there were other eyes as sweet and hearts as true. But with him the elasticity of youth was gone. There was no forming of new ties, no delight in fresh faces. Life had offered him supreme happiness, and he had let it pass by him. Like the base Indian, he had "thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe."

The summer held the city in its spell of wind and fog. Acquaintances who encountered one another on its wide thoroughfares said town was empty—not a soul left in it. The Mortimer Gaults took themselves away for rest and recuperation to balsamic mountain gorges among the redwoods. Letitia returned to the hotels and the Hacienda del Pinos. John Gault was left alone with his empty heart. If she had died it would have been bearable. The inevitableness of death makes us bow to its blows with broken submission. But she was alive—poor, sick, her love disprized, her pride trampled on, driven away from all that was familiar and friendly to her by fear of him.

The winds beat and tore through the city, buffeting the passers-by and sweeping street and alley. Then, as the color deepened toward evening, their stress and clamor suddenly ceased, a burst of radiance ran from the Golden Gate up the sky, glazing the level floor of the bay and flaring on all the western windows. It stayed for a space, seeming to immerse the town in an