Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/21

Rh had more sincerity in it than is usually found in those administered to relations. Then, amused at her girlishly naïve pleasure, he bade her a laughing good night, and without waiting for her response, opened the door and let himself out.

The Mortimer Gaults lived in the newest and most fashionable part of San Francisco. Two years before they had leased one of the houses that have sprung up, alone or in groups of three or four, throughout that quarter of the city where Pacific Avenue runs out along the edges of the sand-hills. Here the undulating lines of the great dunes, dreaming under the ceaseless hush, hush, hush of the wind sweeping through the rank sea-grass, have been hidden under the march of progress. Large new houses, shining with paint and bright with window-boxes, have settled on the slopes, and now hold the sand down. A layer of earth and a hose have transformed the haggard face of the dunes into gardens which would be a mass of vegetation but for the French gardeners' restraining shears.

The house rented by the Gaults, a solid, pale-hued building of the colonial form of architecture, was large, new, and imposing. Flowers drooped over its façade from many window-boxes. Its porch was verdurous with great leafy plants growing in tubs and earthenware