"Well, don't let it make a socialist of you. That is such a cheap revenge on society.... Confession of failure; and nothing in it." IV He looked at his watch: "Eight o'clock. I'll be getting on to the Presidio. Why don't you come with me?" Gora's feminine instincts arose from a less perverted source than her social. She shook her head with a smile. "I don't want to go any farther from my house. I shall slip down my first chance; and I have plenty to eat. Perhaps you will come to see me before you go if my house is spared." "Rather. What is the number? And if the house goes I'll find you somehow." He took her hand in both his and shook it warmly. "You are the best pal in the world--" "Now don't make me a nice little speech. I'm only too glad. Go out to the Presidio and get a hot breakfast and attend--to--to your affairs. I am sure everything will be all right, although you may not be able to get away as soon as you hope." "I don't like leaving you alone here--" "Alone?" She waved her hand at the hundreds of recumbent forms in the cemeteries and on the lower slopes of Calvary. "I probably shall never be so well protected again. Please go." He shook her hand once more, ran down the hill, turned and waved his cap, and trudged off in the direction of the Presidio. V She slept in her own house that night, for dynamiting by miners summoned from Grass Valley by General Funston, and a change of wind, had saved the western portion of the city. For the first time in her life Gora experienced a sense of profound gratitude, almost of happiness. She felt that only a little more would make her quite happy. Her lodgers, even her absorbed brother, noticed that her manner, her expression, had perceptibly softened. She herself noticed it most of all. CHAPTER XI I Gathbroke met Alexina Groome again a week later. On Saturday, when the fire was over, and she could retreat decently and in good order, Mrs. Groome, to her young daughter's secret anguish, had consented to rest her nerves for a fortnight at Rincona, Mrs. Abbott's home in Alta. As Gora had predicted, Gathbroke found that it would have been hardly more difficult to move his sister's body, now at an undertaker's in Fillmore Street, out of the state in war-time than in the wake of a city's disaster, which was scattering its population to every point of the railroad compass. He had refused the space in the baggage car offered to him by the company; it should: be a private car or nothing; and for that, in spite of all the influence Gwynne and his powerful friends could bring to bear, he must wait.