I've just got it--just realized it. She's up and I'm still down, so it wouldn't be square to say anything about it, now would it?"

"No," answered Kate softly, "though we women like bold lovers too."

"Yes, that's so. And I suppose if I keep too still about it, somebody else will come riding onto the ranch and carry her off. It's my game, I guess, to stay around and watch. And if I find any gazebo getting too thick with her, then up speaks little Bertie for the word that makes her his.

"If she'll have me," he added. "But she's a good many pegs above me just now and I've got more than a living to make. Of course, that'll come all right if I have fair luck. If it was easy money plugging my way through college, it will be easy plugging it through the world.

Don't you size it up about that way?"

Kate clasped her hands and leaned forward.

"If you're playing the long game, I suppose so. But wouldn't you do better at least to hint to the girl?"

"I guess you can advise me about that," said he. "Better than anybody I know. Suppose I tell you all about it?" A little panic ran through the nerves of Kate.

"Now?" she said, "are--are you ready?"

"Now-time is good-time," he said. "Well, I guess you've savveyed just who it is and what's the matter. It's--it's Miss Gray--Eleanor Gray."

To the end of her days, Kate Waddington remembered to be thankful for a certain cotton-tail rabbit. At that moment precisely, this fearling of the woods streaked down the trail, pursued by a dog whose heavy crashing sounded in the distance; came out upon them, whirled with a loud roaring of fern and leaves, screamed the heart-rending scream of a frightened rabbit, and dashed off into the wood. The sound, coming in this tender moment, betrayed Bert Chester into a guilty start. So, when he looked back, her face was as smoothly beautiful as ever and she was even smiling.

"You lucky boy!" she said. And then, "I don't blame you. I wouldn't blame any man." Bertram fairly glowed.

"I knew you'd agree with me," he said. "Say, what chance do I stand--honest, what do you believe she thinks of me?"

"Honest, I never heard her say. It is likely she hasn't begun to think of it at all. Women are slower than men about such things. How long have you been--in love with her?"

"Of course, I've been that way ever since I saw her first--ever since I was a student, picking prunes for her uncle, and went down and helped her run a bull off her place. I thought then that I never saw nicer eyes or a more ladylike girl. She's always given me the gla.s.sy eye. I think she hates me--no, it isn't that, either. She just feels superior to me."

"Oh, perhaps not that!"

"Well, anyhow, I was in college and any one girl looked about the same to me as any other--" Bertram wrinkled his brows in contempt for his utter, undeveloped youngness of two years before--"but I remembered her always. When I saw her sitting in the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise that evening, I felt queer; and after I called on her I just knew I had it.

Funny, you coming in that afternoon. You and I have hit it off so well, and here I'm confiding in you! It was a regular luck sign, I think."

Kate's voice, when she spoke, fell to its deeper, richer tones.

"And I'm sure I feel flattered--any girl would. I really thank you--you don't know how much."

"And you'll help me, won't you?"

"With my advice--yes."

"Well, that's all I want. If I win this game, I want to win it square.

"Say, you are sure the goods. You're as pretty--it wouldn't be natural for a man to say you're as pretty as she is, but a man can just look at you and wonder--" and here he dropped one of his hands gently upon hers. She let it rest there a moment before she drew away.

"We'd better be going back," she said. "They'll think it's I and not Eleanor, if we stay so long."

As they started, he stooped to get her another drink. Standing above him, her hand lifted toward her student beri, she bent her gaze on his back. A peculiar look it was, as though an effort against pain. It faded into an expression like hunger.

CHAPTER VIII

It seemed afterward to Bertram Chester, reviewing the early events of a life in which he was well pleased, that his real attack on things, his virtual beginning, came with that house-party of the Masters's.

The victory of his smile on the staircase he followed up that evening to a general conquest. For Masters, when dinner was over, brewed a hot punch. They drank it about the driftwood fire, and even the severe Marion Slater relaxed and made merry. The essence of the G.o.ds strips self-control and delicacy first, so that the finer wit goes by without tribute of a laugh and the wit of poked fingers--especially if it be sauced by personality--rules at the board. After the punch had worked sunshine in them, the poked finger of this young barbarian was more compelling than the sallies of Masters or the mimicry of Harry Banks.

When the party dispersed at the Sausalito Ferry and scattered for a workaday Monday, he found himself accepting invitations left and right. Dr. French asked him to motor out to the Cliff House that very night; Mrs. Masters wanted him to dinner; Harry Banks must have him over to his ranch under Tamalpais. Kate Waddington, mounting the steps to Banks's automobile, slipped him a farewell word.

"You were a success," she said. "That's the reward of naughty little boys when they reform!"

"Well, I'd have liked to smash his face just the same--then."

"You've done better than that--you've quite conquered him. I'll see you Wednesday at the Masters? Good bye!"

Bertram Chester sold forthwith the Richmond lots, his first venture in business, to get ready money for the wisest or the most foolish investment which a young man of affairs can make in the beginning of his career--general society. With all his youth, his energy and his eager attack on things, he plunged into the life of San Francisco.

Only in that city of easy companionships and careless social scrutinies would such a sudden rise have been possible. His furnished room, where he used to read and study of evenings in his years of beginnings, knew him no more before midnight. He dropped away from those comrades of the lower sort with whom he had found his recreation; abandoned and forgotten were his old lights of love. The milliner's apprentice, a coa.r.s.ely pretty little thing, used to wait for him sometimes on the doorstep. Mark Heath, coming home one night earlier than usual, found her there, took her for a walk about the block, and conveyed to her the unpleasant news that Bertram was now flying higher than her covey. After that, she came no more; and the first phase of his life in San Francisco drifted definitely back of Bertram Chester.

We shall stop with him only three or four times in the course of that winter wherein he made his beginnings. Before it was over, he had entered, by the special privilege accorded such characters, the club about which man-society in San Francisco revolved; he had broken into a half a dozen circles of women society; he had become hail-fellow-well-met with the younger sons of the c.o.c.ktail route, the loud characters of flashy Latin quarter studios, the returned Arctic millionaires of the hour and day who kept the Palace Hotel prosperous, the patrons and heroes of the prize-fight games, the small theatrical sets of that small metropolis. Sometimes he flashed in a night through four or five such circles.

He hung of late afternoons over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world--and not the worst brain--revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace, mahogany, crimson lights and cut gla.s.s of formal dinners, whereat, after the wine had gone round, his seat became head of the table.

From these meetings and revels, whereby he made his way along the path of dalliance in the easiest, most childish, most accepting city of the Western world, two or three kaleidoscopic flashes remained in his maturer memory. The night of the football game, for example, he strayed into the annual pitched battle of noise and reproach at the Yellowstone between the California partisans and the Stanford fanatics. A California graduate, his companion along the c.o.c.ktail route, recognized him; immediately, he was riding shoulder high. His bearers broke for the sidewalk, and down Market Street he went, a blue-and-gold serpentine dancing behind him. There was his first Jinks at the Bohemian club--an impromptu affair, thrown in between the revelling Christmas Jinks in the clubhouse and the formally artistic Midsummer High Jinks in the Russian River Grove. The Sire, noting his smile and figure, impressed him into service for a small part. This brought a fortnight of rehearsal which was all play and expression of young animal spirits, a night of revel refined by art, an after-jinks dinner of the cast, whereat Bertram, as usual, spoke only to conquer.

Memory held also one perfectly-blended winter house-party at the Banks ranch, with the rain swaying the eucalyptus trees outside and a dozen people chosen from San Francisco for their power to entertain, making two nights and a day cheerful within.

Later in life, he, the unreflective, thought that times had changed in his city; that men were not so brilliant nor circles so convivial as when he was very young. It was not in him to know that neither times nor men had changed; that he thought so only because he looked on them no longer through the rose gla.s.ses of youth.

He himself would have called it a season of great change, and he would have missed, at that, the greatest change of all--the transformation in himself. The face on which we saw so little written when he had that meeting in the Hotel Ma.r.s.eillaise, the new sheet straight from the mills of the G.o.ds, had now a faint scratching upon it. The mouth was looser in repose, firmer in action; the roving and merry eye was more certain, more accurate as it were, in its glances. His youthful a.s.surance had changed in him to something like mature self-certainty.

In those external city manners which he had set about from the beginning to acquire, he showed more ease. Although he had lost the fragrance of an untouched youth, he had become altogether a prettier figure of a man.

He needed all the prodigal youth and the cowboy strength in him to keep up his social pace and still do his work, but he managed it.

Indeed, he became of distinct value to the office through the business which he brought in from his wandering and his revelling. It seemed that he might refurbish that old law practice and find his way to the partnership which Judge Tiffany foresaw at the end of one path.

Through this consideration and through the partisan friendship of Mrs.

Tiffany, he became gradually a pet and familiar of the Tiffany household, taking pot-luck dinners with them, joining them once or twice on their out-of-doors excursions. His big, bounding presence, his good-natured gambols of the Newfoundland pup order, transformed that somewhat serious and faded menage, gave it light and interest, as from a baby in the house. Although Mrs. Tiffany mothered him, gave him her errands to do, she made no mistake about the centre of attraction for him. He was "after" Eleanor. That young woman took him soberly and naturally, laughing at his gambols, accepting his attentions, but giving no sign to Mrs. Tiffany's attentive eyes that her interest was more than indifferent friendship.

His wooing, in fact, went on in a desultory fashion, as though he were following the policy which he had expounded to Kate Waddington--"hang around and watch." He paid no more compliments to grey eyes; he paid no compliments at all. When they were alone, he entertained her with those new tales of his a.s.sociations in the city, which pleased her less, had he only known it, than his tales of the ranch and gridiron.

If he showed the state of his feeling, it was no more than by an occasional long and hungry look.

In one way or another, he saw nearly as much of Kate Waddington, that winter, as he did of Eleanor. Kate, too, was a ray of light. She--"the little sister of the clever" her enemies called her--made the Tiffany house a bourne between her stops at her home in the Mission and her rangings about Russian Hill. Bertram noticed with sentimental pleasure that the two girls were a great deal together. He found them exchanging the coin of feminine friendship in Eleanor's living-room, he met them on shopping excursions in Post street. When the three met so, Kate always sparkled with her best wit, her most cheerful manner; but she showed, too, a kind of deference toward Eleanor, an att.i.tude which said, "He is yours; I am intruding only by accident." The meaning in this att.i.tude bore itself in, at length, even upon Bertram Chester; and he did not fail to glow with grat.i.tude. He expressed that grat.i.tude once or twice when he was alone with Kate. Somehow, it was easy for him to talk to her about such things.

CHAPTER IX

"Are you off the job to-night?" came the resonant voice of Bertram Chester over the telephone.