That was all—­until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library assistant.  She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat.  And Thompson thought there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn.  He was just as sure that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table.  And he rose impulsively to go to her.

She turned away in the same instant and walked quickly down a passage between the rows of shelved books.  Thompson could not drive himself to hurry, nor to call.  He was sure—­yet not too sure.  He hated to make himself appear ridiculous.  Nor was he overconfident that if it were indeed Sophie Carr she would be either pleased or willing to renew their old intimacy.  And so, lagging faint-heartedly, he lost her in the maze of books.

But he did not quite give up.  He was on the second floor.  The windows on a certain side overlooked the main entrance.  He surmised that she would be leaving.  So he crossed to a window that gave on the library entrance and waited for an eternity it seemed, but in reality a scant five minutes, before he caught sight of a mauve suit on the broad steps.  Looking from above he could be less sure than when she stood at the desk.  But the girl halted at the foot of the steps and standing by a red roadster turned to look up at the library building.  The sun fell full upon her upturned face.  The distance was one easily to be spanned by eyes as keen as his.  Thompson was no longer uncertain.  He was suddenly, acutely unhappy.  The old ghosts which he had thought well laid were walking, rattling their dry bones forlornly in his ears.

Sophie got into the machine.  The red roadster slid off with gears singing their metallic song as she shifted through to high.  Thompson watched it turn a corner, and went back to his table with a mind past all possibility of concentrating upon anything between the covers of a book.  He put the volume back on its shelf at last and went out to walk the streets in aimless, restless fashion, full of vivid, painful memories, troubled by a sudden flaring up of emotions which had lain so long dormant he had supposed them dead.

Here in San Francisco he had not expected to behold Sophie in the enjoyment of her good fortune.  Yet there was no reason why she should not be here.  Thompson damned under his breath the blind chance which had set him aboard the wrong steamer at Wrangel.

But, he said to himself after a time, what did it matter?  In a city of half a million they were as far apart as if he were still at Lone Moose and she God only knew where.  That powerful roadster, the sort of clothes she wore, the general air of well-being which he had begun to recognize as a characteristic of people whose social and financial position is impregnable—­these things served to intensify the gulf between them which their radical differences of outlook had originally opened.  No, Sophie Carr’s presence in San Francisco could not possibly make any difference to him.  He repeated this emphatically—­with rather more emphasis than seemed necessary.