“Get out!” he repeated, with brief emphasis.

She cast a look at him, half despair and half admiration.  He pointed to the door.  She went.

Hilmer laughed and regained the living room.  Starratt hesitated.

“I guess I’d better pick up the mess,” he said, with an attempt at nonchalance.

Nobody made any reply.  He bent over the litter.  Above the faint tinkle of shattered porcelain dropping upon the lacquered tray he heard his wife’s voice cloying the air with unpleasant sweetness as she said: 

“Oh yes, Mr. Hilmer, you were telling us about the time you fought a man with a dirk knife ... for a half loaf of bread.”

CHAPTER II

When the Hilmers left, about half past eleven, Starratt went down to the curb with them, on the pretext of looking at Hilmer’s new car.  It proved to be a very late and very luxurious model.

“Is it insured?” asked Starratt, as he lifted Mrs. Hilmer in.

“What a hungry bunch you insurance men are!” Hilmer returned.  “You’re the fiftieth man that’s asked me that.”

Starratt flushed.  The business end of his suggestion had been the last thing in his mind.  He managed to voice a commonplace protest, and Hilmer, taking his place at the wheel, said: 

“Come in and talk it over sometime...  Perhaps you can persuade me.”

Starratt smiled pallidly and the car shot forward.  He watched it out of sight.  Instead of going back into the house he walked aimlessly down the block.  He had no objective beyond a desire to kill the time and give Helen a chance to retire before he returned.  He wasn’t in a mood for talking.

It was not an unusual thing for him to take a stroll before turning in, and habit led him along a beaten path.  He always found it fascinating to dip down the Hyde Street hill toward Lombard Street, where he could glimpse both the bay and the opposite shore.  Then, he liked to pass the old-fashioned gardens spilling the mingled scent of heliotrope and crimson sage into the lap of night.  There was something fascinating and melancholy about this venerable quarter that had been spared the ravages of fire ... overlooked, as it were, by the relentless flames, either in pity or contempt.  There had been marvelous tales concerning this section’s escape from the holocaust of 1906, when San Francisco had been shaken by earthquake and shriveled by flames.  One house had been saved by a crimson flood of wine siphoned from its fragrant cellar, another by pluck and a garden hose, a third by quickly hewn branches of eucalyptus and cypress piled against the outside walls as a screen to the blistering heat.  Trees and hedges and climbing honeysuckle had contributed, no doubt, to the defense of these relics of a more genial day, but the dogged determination of their owners to save their old homes at any cost must have been the determining factor,