Outside, he turned to the right and walked slowly forward toward where the rumble of traffic indicated one of the large and populous thoroughfares of the district. Before him, at 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 in an early death. He had never heard anything against her character, but she had been an actress, the essence of whose art is the capacity to both conceal and assume emotion. And her daughter, in personal appearance at least, resembled her. He had heard that from the colonel himself. A feeling of weariness and disillusion took possession of him, and in the sickness of heart that it brought he thought suddenly of Letitia. She was the one woman he knew that he could always rely on to be true and steadfast and genuine. Why had he not loved her--a woman a man could trust forever, and handsome enough to be the wife of a king? There would be no doubts nor difficulties in a life with her; it would be all kindness and cheer and sympathy. And even as he thus reflected, he knew that love for Letitia was as far from him as was indifference to the woman whom he mistrusted.