Faring down the street with a quick step, John Gault passed many such dwellings, the homes of the city's well-to-do and wealthy. Here and there an undrawn blind afforded him a glimpse of a glowing interior, where the tall, shrouded lamp cast its light over a room as gaily brilliant as the one he had just left. But his eye traveled over the illuminated pane with unseeing preoccupation. He walked rapidly, and with the undeviating glance of inward reflection. Once he stopped at a corner lamp and looked at his watch. Then he hastened his steps, and a few blocks farther on boarded a cross-town car. The part of the city toward which he was going was of a very different aspect and period. His car passed from the quiet gentility of the West Side toward the hum and glare of the business quarter. It swept him through streets full of the rank and ugly sidewalk life of a great city after dark to where Market Street, the town's main artery, throbbed and roared with the traffic of the night. The line he had taken reached its terminus here, and he alighted, made his way through the crowd and clangor of the wide thoroughfare, and plunged into the streets beyond. Here at once the wayfarer feels himself in a locality whence prosperity and fashion have withdrawn themselves. The ill-lit streets, the small and squalid shops, the sordid faces of the passers-by, tell their own tale of a region fallen from grace. John Gault had too often passed this way for the ruinous aspect of the surroundings to possess any interest for him. With a thin thread of cigarette smoke streaming out above his upturned collar, he passed on rapidly through the patches of shadow and garish light from show-windows. People turned and looked at him sharply, his noticeable figure being an unusual one in that locality. To one watching it might have seemed that this curiosity annoyed him, for he quickened his pace, and at the first side street turned off to the left. There were fewer wayfarers here; the lamps were far apart, and on either hand the dark forms of huge houses, their façades showing only an occasional light in an upper window, loomed vague and forbidding. The dreariness of desertion seemed to hold them in a spell, as they rose, brooding and black, from the dimness of overgrown gardens. This had been one of the great streets in San Francisco's splendid heyday. Here millionairedom had built its palaces and held its revels. John Gault remembered some of them, and now his eye passed blankly over the lines of darkened windows and the wide porticos where years before, on his vacations from college, he had entered as a guest. But his thoughts were elsewhere.