A group of the more thoughtful and patriotic citizens, assisted by the one militant editor the city boasted, were doing all that was humanly possible to prevent the re-election of the mayor, who had already represented the worst element twice, and to break the power of the Boss. Isabel in her lonely ranch house, when her chickens were asleep, followed the fight with a passionate interest, and was tempted to come forth from her seclusion and meet at least the representative men of her city. But she was not yet ready to take up her own share of the burden, and was far too modest to imagine that she could be useful until she had become a person of importance in San Francisco. Nevertheless, as she looked down to-day on the sharp outlines of the city under the hard blue sky, almost glittering in their golden bath, she was impatient to become a part of its life, or at least to discuss its interests with some one. Rosewater, which of late years had become virtuous to excess, and almost blind and deaf with local pride, took no interest in San Francisco whatever, except as a market for eggs. When driven to the wall it confessed the superiority of the metropolis in the matter of shops and theatres; but its politics it invariably dismissed with adjectives more forcible than elegant. It was at this point in Isabel's meditations that her eye happened to rove along the plank walk to the rickety old flight of steps that led from Taylor Street up Russian Hill. There was something vaguely familiar about a tall, thin, well-groomed, but by no means graceful, figure rapidly ascending the steps. In a moment her mind lost its tensity of projection and she was almost flying down her own long stair. Gwynne broke into a run as he saw her. She wondered if he intended to kiss her, but he merely shook her hand for a full minute. "I never in my life was so glad to see anybody!" he exclaimed, with the joyousness of a school-boy come home for his first holiday. "It was such luck to hear that you were in San Francisco." "But why didn't you telegraph? In a way I am disappointed--glad as I am to see you. I intended to meet you at Oakland and take you directly up to Lumalitas, where everything was to have been in gala array. And how did you know I was in town?" "While I was taking my lonely breakfast this morning--I arrived late yesterday afternoon--and glancing over one of your newspapers, my eye caught your name. I learned that 'the charming and beautiful young mistress of the old Belmont House on Russian Hill, who had excited so much interest of late, had come down as usual for Sunday." "No?" Isabel flushed for the first time within Gwynne's knowledge of her. "That is the very only time I have been the subject of a newspaper paragraph--outside of Rosewater, which doesn't count--and I am as delighted--as I have no doubt you were the first time you saw your name in print!" she added, defiantly.