As they pushed off, all the marsh and its creek was covered with a low white mist that gave it the appearance of a great lake, a ghost lake through which the little steamer just leaving Rosewater two miles above coiled its way like a monstrous white bird feeling uneasily for a foothold. Overhead the sky was covered with the pink fleece of dawn. The mass of mountains in Marin County looked black and formless, but above them rose the granite crest of Tamalpais, like an angular lifted shoulder. "That mountain has marched north five feet in the last forty years," said Isabel, as she carefully steered through the mist. "Either that, or the earthquake of 1868 moved her off her base." "For heaven's sake don't tell me any more weird tales about this country; it gives me the horrors often enough as it is. This morning the hills and mountain on the other side of the valley looked like antediluvian monsters just ready to turn over." "Well, they have turned over a few times, and may again. One reason we all love California is because we never know what she will do next, and because she is still primeval under this thin coat of civilization that is too tight for her. I admire England, but I could not live in it. It is too peaceful, too done. It is impossible to imagine any further change, for civilization can go no further. But out here--the whole country may stand on its head any day; and we may yet have cities as great as Babylon and Nineveh." "Well, we'll not be here to see. This fog is just high enough to filter into one's very marrow--even your picturesque pioneer days are over; I will confess they might have made me feel that life on the edge of the world was worth while. I should have liked to lay the foundations of a great isolated city like San Francisco; but I don't see any sign of another big city. Los Angeles is a little Chicago and may live to be a big one, but nothing would induce me to live in the south. However, no man is ever conscious of the fact that he is in at the birth of a great city; our pioneer forefathers were just a parcel of adventurers crazed with the lust of gold, and with no sense of any future beyond the present." Isabel leaned forward eagerly. "You have been thinking about San Francisco!" she exclaimed, triumphantly. "The old Otis blood is beginning to wake up! Hooray!" Gwynne laughed outright, and for the first time without resentment; he was tired of having California "rammed down his throat." Isabel's eyes were dancing with so purely youthful and feminine a triumph that he could not but feel indulgent. "I am growing reconciled to my lot. Here I am and here I remain." "Yes, you are much happier," said Isabel, softly. She half closed her eyes and looked a trifle older. "It worried me dreadfully at first to know that you were unhappy, and that it was my fault." "Unhappy!" exclaimed Gwynne, reddening haughtily. "I have not been mooning about like a homesick ass--"