Clytie remained a while in the arbor. The fog had begun to come in now with a vanguard of light fleecy clouds riding high in the air, closing the bay in from all sides. The massive bank behind followed slowly, tinted with opal and rose from the setting sun. It settled down, shutting out her sight of the water, and its cohorts were soon scurrying past her on their charge overland from ocean to harbor. The siren at Point Bonita sighed dismally across the channel. It soon grew too cold to remain longer in the garden, and she went into the house shivering, lighted an open fire in the library and sat down. For half an hour she sat there in silence, inert, listless, lost in thought, her eyes on the blurred landscape mystic with driving fog. The room grew darker, illuminated only by the fitful flashes of the fire. Her still, relaxed figure, fragile and delicate as an ivory carving, was alternately captured and hidden by the shadow and rescued and restored by the sudden gleam from the hearth. She had not moved when her father’s step was heard in the hall. He came in, benignly sedate. His deep voice vibrated through the room. "Well, Cly, dreaming again?" She started at the sound and came out of her reverie to rise and greet him affectionately. He put down some books and a package of papers and lighted the chandelier, exchanging commonplaces with her—of her bookbinding work, which she confessed to have shirked; of the weather, with a little of old age’s querulous complaint of rheumatic touches; of the black cat, which was their domestic fetish and (an immortally interesting topic to him) of the vileness and poisonous quality of San Francisco illuminating gas. His voice flowed on mellifluously with unctuous authority, as he seated himself in his arm-chair beneath the lamp, shook out his evening paper and rattled its flapping sheets. Clytie evinced a mild interest in his remarks, smiled gently at his familiar vagaries, answering when replies should be forthcoming, in her low, even, monotonously pitched tones. She questioned him perfunctorily about the book he was writing, an absorbing avocation with him, warding off his usual disappointment at her lack of sympathy by involving herself in a conversational web of explanation regarding Foreign Trade Expansion, Reciprocal Profits and The Open Door in the Orient. "There’s not much use working on it at the office," he concluded. "I’m too liable to interruptions." "Who interrupted you to-day?" she asked.