Bellevue began to gossip about the couple at Highcourt, and divided as always into two camps with shades of opinion within each camp. The women were generally for Archie, even if he had been foolish with his wife's money and was conducting his "affair" with Irene Pointer rather recklessly. If his wife were less stupid and selfish about not going about with him in society, she could have "held him." The men liked Archie well enough, but knew that he was "no good." XXXVII It was some time after the young mason's return to his job before Adelle even learned his name. She had no curiosity about his name, indicating how little of the personal or sentimental there was in the interest she felt in him. He was just the "mason," and she always addressed him as "mason" until one day she heard the foreman call him--"Clark"; and then, when the foreman had passed on, she said with mild curiosity,-- "Is your name Clark?" "Yes," the man replied with a touch of pride in the pure English name,--"Clark without the e. I'm Tom Clark. Father's name was Stanley Clark, same as grandfather's. Everybody about Sacramento used to know old Stan Clark!" "My name was Clark, too, before I was married," Adelle remarked. "Did you spell it with an _e_?" Tom Clark asked. "No, the same as yours, without the _e_," she replied. "We must be related somewheres," the mason laughed, with a sense of irony. "Where did your family come from?" "Somewhere East--Missouri, I think. But that was long ago--before the gold times. Grandfather Stan came out in forty-nine and settled on the Sacramento River, and that was where father was raised." Adelle felt a slight increase in her interest in the mason from their having the same name, and she remarked idly,-- "So your family lived once in Missouri?" "The Clarks came from Missouri--that's all I know. Mother's folks were Scotch-Irish, and that's where I get my red head, I guess!" Like most Americans of his class he knew nothing more of his origin than the preceding two generations. The family was lost in the vague limbo of "back East somewheres." Yet he was proud that the Clarks had come from the East and were among the first Americans to enter the golden land of opportunity. And he apologized for the failure of his ancestors to attach to themselves a larger share of prosperity. "If we could have hung on to grandfather's old ranch, we'd not one of us been working for other folks to-day. He had a hundred and sixty acres of as pretty a bit of land as there is in Sacramento Valley--part of it is now in the city limits, too. But father was sort of slack in some ways,--didn't realize what a big future California had,--so he sold off most of the ranch for almost nothing, and mother had to part with the rest." He flipped a trowelful of mortar and whistled as if to express thus his sense of fate. "Too bad," Adelle replied. "They say you ought never to sell any land. It's all likely to be more valuable some day."