Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/89

Rh the end of the street's long vista, the sunset glowed pink, barred by a delicate scoring of telegraph-wires. Even as he looked it deepened and burned higher and higher up the sky, while at the far end of the vista it concentrated into a core of brightness, as though a conflagration were in progress there.

What was he to think? He felt his mind confused and full of warring images. He had been almost afraid of what she might say—she who was to him the ideal of all that was gentlest and truest and most maidenly. And yet what had she said to disturb or annoy him? It was only the foolish prattle of a girl who is happy and in high spirits. And even as he made these assurances to himself, sentences from the past interview surged up to the surface of his mind: "I 'm afraid I 'm mercenary, and it 's such a horrid fault to have." "Where are my riches coming from? It will have to be either begging, borrowing, or stealing."

Her mother had been an actress—one of the stars of San Francisco's hectic youth. Dissimulation might be instinctive with a woman of Viola Reed's heredity. It was the whole art of acting; it was in her blood. He thought of all he had ever heard of her mother, of her few years of fame and glory, so splendidly ended by her marriage to the bonanza millionaire. It had been a wonderful, glittering life, quenched