At all events it was a straw and she grasped it as if it had been a plank in mid-ocean. With even a bare chance that Mortimer was innocent it would be unpardonable to insult and wound him.... Nor was it quite possible to ask him if his sister were a thief. She must wait, of course. And if Gora had taken the bonds they might be recovered. It would be like a woman to secrete them in a reaction of terror after having nerved herself up to the deed. She wished that Gora had gone to Hong Kong. Bolted. Then she could be certain. But at least she had a respite, and she felt so ebullient that she almost forgot her loss, and swept Morty over to the Lawtons after dinner; and the Judge took them all to the movies. CHAPTER IX I Alexina would listen to no remonstrance. Gora might send her trunks to Geary Street if she liked, but she must come home to Ballinger House and spend at least one night with her brother and sister, who had missed her quite dreadfully. Gora wondered how Alexina could have missed her so touchingly in Europe, but accepted the invitation, as a note from the surgeon to whom she had written by the previous steamer asked her to hold herself in readiness for an operation a week hence. Gora was looking remarkably well, and Alexina assumed it was not only the six months of mountain life and the three months in the tropics. She had an air of assured power, rarely absent in a woman who has found herself and achieved a definite place in life. Besides being one of the best nurses in San Francisco, in constant demand by the leading doctors and surgeons, her short stories had attracted considerable attention in the magazines, although no publisher would risk bringing them out in book form. But they were invariably mentioned in any summary of the year's best stories, one had been included in a volume of selected short stories by modern authors, and one in a recent text-book compiled for the benefit of aspirants in the same difficult art. The remuneration had been insignificant, for her stories were not of the popular order, and she had not yet the name that alone commands the high reward; but she had advanced farther than many another as severely handicapped, and she knew through her admiring sister-in-law and Aileen Lawton that her stories were mentioned occasionally at a San Francisco dinner table and even discussed! She was "arriving." No doubt of that. II "When will the novel come out? I can't wait." "Not until the spring." They were sitting in Alexina's room and Gora had been placed directly in front of the cabinet, which she did not appear even to see. She had taken off her hat and coat and was holding the heavy masses of hair away from her head. "Do you mind? I feel as if I had a twenty-pound weight...." "What a question! Do what you want."