After a little of this, she drew him on to speak of himself. She had heard news of him, she said, from her uncle, who said that he was doing well and gave promise of a future in the law. How long had he remained on the ranch that summer? This reference put him back into his presumptive mood. "You went away without giving me a chance to say good-bye," he complained. "I never saw you again after the party on the lawn." Her tongue ran away with her. "I saw you, though," she said. "Where?" "Oh, at a distance." He caught nothing from her tone, yet a slight change did come into her manner, as though something had been drawn between them. Then her escort fell in on the other side of Eleanor, appropriating her by right and by consent of her attitude. Now they were in Broadway, skirting the small bake-shops, the dark alleys, all the picture scenes of the Latin quarter. At that very moment, Miss Waddington drew a little apart from the group clustering about Masters and Mark Heath. An Italian baby of three, too late out of bed, stood by a cellar rail surveying them with the liquid fire which was his eyes. Kate Waddington stooped to pat his head. As she raised herself, she was beside Bertram. Nothing more natural than that she should fall in, step by step, beside him. He caught step with her, but he still looked toward Eleanor. "Wonderful girl, isn't she?" asked Kate. "She sure is." "Her mother," said Kate, "had more wit than any other woman in San Francisco--and the men she had!" "I think Eleanor has inherited _that_ at any rate," she added after a pause. They had reached the door of the Marionette Theatre now. Afterward they drank beer at Norman's; and when they broke up, Bertram Chester found himself with three invitations to call. * * * * * Kate Waddington spent that night with Eleanor Gray in the Tiffany House on Russian Hill. While they sat before the fireplace, in the half-hour of loosened hair and confidences, Eleanor broke a minute of silence with the inquiry: "What did you think of him?" An instant after she let slip this impersonal inquiry, she would have given gold to recall it. And if she had any hope that Kate Waddington had missed the point, it died in her when Kate answered in an indifferent tone: "He? Oh, he seems to me to be a little promiscuous." CHAPTER VI