Starratt smiled pallidly and the car shot forward. He watched it out of sight. Instead of going back into the house he walked aimlessly down the block. He had no objective beyond a desire to kill the time and give Helen a chance to retire before he returned. He wasn't in a mood for talking. It was not an unusual thing for him to take a stroll before turning in, and habit led him along a beaten path. He always found it fascinating to dip down the Hyde Street hill toward Lombard Street, where he could glimpse both the bay and the opposite shore. Then, he liked to pass the old-fashioned gardens spilling the mingled scent of heliotrope and crimson sage into the lap of night. There was something fascinating and melancholy about this venerable quarter that had been spared the ravages of fire ... overlooked, as it were, by the relentless flames, either in pity or contempt. There had been marvelous tales concerning this section's escape from the holocaust of 1906, when San Francisco had been shaken by earthquake and shriveled by flames. One house had been saved by a crimson flood of wine siphoned from its fragrant cellar, another by pluck and a garden hose, a third by quickly hewn branches of eucalyptus and cypress piled against the outside walls as a screen to the blistering heat. Trees and hedges and climbing honeysuckle had contributed, no doubt, to the defense of these relics of a more genial day, but the dogged determination of their owners to save their old homes at any cost must have been the determining factor, Starratt had often thought, as he lingered before the old picket fences, in an attempt to revive his memories of other days. He could not remember, of course, quite back to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his generation. This was the section where his mother had languished in the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father's discreet advances. The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reënforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms of a homesick and wind-bitten magnolia. He was sure, judged by present-day standards, that his mother's old home must have been a very modest, genial sort of place ... without doubt a clapboard, two-storied affair with a single wide gable and a porch running the full length of the front. But, in a day when young and pretty women were at a premium, one did not have to live in a mansion to attract desirable suitors, and Fred Starratt had often heard his mother remind his father without bitterness of the catches that had been thrown her way. Not that Starratt, senior, had been a bad prospect matrimonially. Quite the contrary. He had come from Boston in the early '70s, of good substantial family, and with fair looks and a capacity for getting on. Likewise, a chance for inside tips on the stock market, since he had