Fred Starratt crawled back toward the precipice.  The rain descended in torrents and a wind rose to meet its violence.  He looked down.  The pool below was churning to whitecapped fury, releasing a flood of greedy and ferocious gurglings.  Gradually a bitter silence fell and a gloom gathered.  Everything went black as midnight...

He felt a cold blast playing through his hair.  Instinctively he put his hand to his head.  His hat was gone.

Suddenly it came to him that he would have to go back to Fairview ... alone.

He rose to his feet.  “North ... a mile or two!” he muttered.  “If I can once cross the bridge!”

CHAPTER XVI

On a certain evening in February Fred Starratt, from the upper deck of a ferryboat, again saw the dusky outlines of San Francisco stretch themselves in faint allurement pricked with glittering splendor.  It was a mild night—­the skies clear, the air tinged with pleasant chill, the bay stilled to nocturnal quiet.

He had come out upon the upper deck to be alone.  He wanted to approach the city of his birth in decent solitude, to feel the thrill of home-coming in all its poignant melancholy.  He had expected the event to assume a special significance, to be fraught with hidden meaning, to set his pulses leaping.  But he had to confess that neither the beauty of the night nor the uncommon quality of the event moved him.  Had he been wrung dry of all emotional reaction?  It was not until a woman came from the stuffy cabin and took a seat in a sheltered corner outside that he had the slightest realization of the nearness of his old environment.  As she passed close to his pacing form a sickly sweet odor enveloped him.  He looked after her retreating figure.  She was carrying a yellow armful of blossoming acacia.  The perfume evoked a sad memory of virginal springs innumerable ... springs that seemed to go back wistfully beyond his own existence ... springs long dead and never to be revived.  Dead?  No, perhaps not quite that, but springs never to be again his portion.  This perfume of the blossoming acacia ... how in the old days it had always brought home a sense of awakening, a sense of renewal to a land burned and seared and ravished in the hot and tearless passion of summer!  Following the first rains would come the faint flush of green upon the hillsides, growing a little deeper as the healing floods released themselves, and then, one day, suddenly, almost overnight, the acacia would bend beneath a yellow burden, sending a swooning fragrance out to match the yellow sunlight of February.  From that moment on the pageant was continuous, bud and blossom and virginal leaf succeeding one another in showering abundance.  But nothing that followed quite matched the heavy beauty of these first golden boughs, nothing that could evoke quite the same infinite yearning for hidden and heroic destinies.  He defined the spell of the perfume again, but he did not feel it.  It shook his memory to its foundations, but it left his senses cold.  And the city before him was as sharply revealed and as cruelly unmoving.