Mrs. Willers retired to the bedroom to dress, occasionally coming to the doorway in various stages of déshabille to give instructions to the child. Her toilet was accomplished with mutilated rites, and by the time the sacrificial moment came of laying on the rouge her cheeks were too flushed with excitement to need it. When she did appear it would have been difficult to recognize her as the woman of an hour earlier. Even the black silhouettes had passed through a metamorphosis and appeared as a fluff of careless curls. The first guest to arrive was the man she had spoken of as Essex. The ladies at the windows below had been struck into whispering surprise by his appearance. San Francisco was still enjoying its original reputation as a land of picturesque millionaires, who lived lives of lawlessness and splendor. Men of position still wore soft felt hats and buttoned themselves tight into prince-albert coats when they went down to business in the morning. Perhaps in the traveled circles, where the Bonanza kings and their associates lived after European models, there were men who bore the stamp of metropolitan finish, as Barry Essex did. But they did not visit Sutter Street boarding-houses nor wear silk hats when they paid afternoon calls. San Francisco was still in that stage when this form of headgear was principally associated in its mind with the men who drew teeth and sold patent medicines on the sand lots behind the city hall. Barry Essex, anywhere, would have been a striking figure. He was a handsome man of some thirty years, tall and spare, and with a dark, smooth-shaven face where the nose was high and the eyes veiled and cold. He looked like a person of high birth, and there were stories that he was, though by the left hand. He spoke with an English accent, and, when asked his nationality, shrugged his shoulders and said it was hard to say what it was--his father had been a Spaniard, his mother an Englishwoman, and he had been born and reared in France. That he was a man of ability and education, superior to the work he was doing as special writer on Jake Shackleton’s paper, _The Trumpet_, was obvious. But San Francisco had become so used to mysteriously interesting strangers, that come from no one knows where, and suggest an attractively unconventional history, that the particular curiosity excited by Essex soon died, and he was merely of moment as the author of some excellent articles on art, literature and music in _The Sunday Trumpet_.