When the party dispersed at the Sausalito Ferry and scattered for a workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps to Banks's automobile, slipped him a farewell word. "You were a success," she said. "That's the reward of naughty little boys when they reform!" "Well, I'd have liked to smash his face just the same--then." "You've done better than that--you've quite conquered him. I'll see you Wednesday at the Masters? Good bye!" Bertram Chester sold forthwith the Richmond lots, his first venture in business, to get ready money for the wisest or the most foolish investment which a young man of affairs can make in the beginning of his career--general society. With all his youth, his energy and his eager attack on things, he plunged into the life of San Francisco. Only in that city of easy companionships and careless social scrutinies would such a sudden rise have been possible. His furnished room, where he used to read and study of evenings in his years of beginnings, knew him no more before midnight. He dropped away from those comrades of the lower sort with whom he had found his recreation; abandoned and forgotten were his old lights of love. The milliner's apprentice, a coarsely pretty little thing, used to wait for him sometimes on the doorstep. Mark Heath, coming home one night earlier than usual, found her there, took her for a walk about the block, and conveyed to her the unpleasant news that Bertram was now flying higher than her covey. After that, she came no more; and the first phase of his life in San Francisco drifted definitely back of Bertram Chester. We shall stop with him only three or four times in the course of that winter wherein he made his beginnings. Before it was over, he had entered, by the special privilege accorded such characters, the club about which man-society in San Francisco revolved; he had broken into a half a dozen circles of women society; he had become hail-fellow-well-met with the younger sons of the cocktail route, the loud characters of flashy Latin quarter studios, the returned Arctic millionaires of the hour and day who kept the Palace Hotel prosperous, the patrons and heroes of the prize-fight games, the small theatrical sets of that small metropolis. Sometimes he flashed in a night through four or five such circles.