The summer held the city in its spell of wind and fog. Acquaintances who encountered one another on its wide thoroughfares said town was empty--not a soul left in it. The Mortimer Gaults took themselves away for rest and recuperation to balsamic mountain gorges among the redwoods. Letitia returned to the hotels and the Hacienda del Pinos. John Gault was left alone with his empty heart. If she had died it would have been bearable. The inevitableness of death makes us bow to its blows with broken submission. But she was alive--poor, sick, her love disprized, her pride trampled on, driven away from all that was familiar and friendly to her by fear of him. The winds beat and tore through the city, buffeting the passers-by and sweeping street and alley. Then, as the color deepened toward evening, their stress and clamor suddenly ceased, a burst of radiance ran from the Golden Gate up the sky, glazing the level floor of the bay and flaring on all the western windows. It stayed for a space, seeming to immerse the town in an atmosphere of beaten gold, as if for one brief half-hour it was transformed into the glistening El Dorado of the early settlers' dreams. Then the fog stole noiselessly in, and the houses crowding to the summits of the hills, the rose-red clouds, and the clear purple distances were blotted out. That went on day by day till the autumn came. The winds dropped and the sun shone all day. In the country the air was clear and heavy with sweet, aromatic scents. All the fields were parched and sun-dried like hemp; only the thick-growing, bushy trees defied the drought, remaining green and hardy. The great hills were scorched to a smooth yellow, with a few green tree-tufts slipped down into their valleys where the watercourses were not quite dry. In town it was all still and golden and hot. The city, queening it on its hills, rose in an atmosphere of crystal clearness from a girdle of sapphire sea. In the evening the smoke lay lightly over it, and the sun glared through like a great, inquisitive eye. Poor people in the old districts were ill from lack of rain and from unclean sewers. Rich people were coming back, looking sunburnt and healthy from their summer in the open air. The Gaults came up out of their lounging-place in the redwoods, robust and blooming, Mortimer quite restored to health, and Maud two shades darker with her country tan. Letitia, with three trunks of ruined millinery, appeared from the hotels, and the town house was once more alive. They had seen little of John since they left for the country, and it was not strange that Maud Gault, after his first visit, should have said to her husband: "What's the matter with John? All of a sudden he looks quite old." "Nothing," said the loyal Mortimer; "only a fellow can't be expected to look young forever. John's not like a woman: he doesn't keep the same age for twenty years." VI