Half way up the hill she had fainted and he had carried her into a house whose door stood open. There was no one in the house, and after a futile attempt to revive her, he had run back to the hotel to find a doctor. But among the few people that had the courage to remain so close to the fire there was no doctor. The hotel clerk gave him an address but told him not to be too sure of finding his man at home as all the physicians were probably attending the injured, helping to clear the threatened hospitals, or at work among the refugees, any number of women having embraced the inopportune occasion to become mothers. The doctor whose address was given him not only was out but his house was deserted; and, distracted, he returned to his sister. He knew at once that she was dead. He sat beside her for hours, too stunned to think.... It was some time during the night that the roar of the fire seemed to grow louder, the smoke in the street denser. Then it occurred to him that the inhabitants of this house as well as of the doctor's, which was close by, would not have abandoned their homes if they had not believed that some time during the night they would be in the path of the flames. And he had heard that the pipes of the one water system had been broken by the earthquake. He had caught up the body of his sister and walked westward until, worn out, he had entered the basement of another empty house, and there he had fallen asleep. When he awakened he was under the impression for a moment that he was in the crater of a volcano in eruption. Dynamite was going off in all directions, he could hear the loud crackling of flames behind his refuge; and as he took the body in his arms once more and ran out, the fire was sweeping up the hill not a block below. In spite of the smoke he inferred that the way was clear to the west, and he had run on and on, once narrowly escaping a dynamiting area where he saw men like dark shadows prowling and then rushing off madly in an automobile ... dodging the fire, losing his way, once finding himself confronting a wall of flames, finally crossing a wide avenue ... stumbling on ... and on.... IV Gora decided that blunt callousness would help him more than sympathy. He had recovered his self-control, but his eyes were still wide with pain and horror. "Cremation is a clean honest finish for any one," she remarked, lighting another cigarette and offering him her match. "I should have left her if she had been my sister in that first house...." "I might have done it--in London. But ... perhaps I was not quite myself.... I couldn't leave her to be burned alone in a strange country. Besides, the horror of it would have killed my mother. Marian was the youngest. I felt bound to do my best.... Perhaps I didn't think at all.... If this house is threatened I shall take her out to the Presidio, where I happen to know a man--Colonel Norris. Thanks to your hospitality I can make it."