Abbott's home
in Alta.
As Gora had predicted, Gathbroke found that it would have been hardly more
difficult to move his sister's body, now at an undertaker's in Fillmore
Street, out of the state in war-time than in the wake of a city's disaster,
which was scattering its population to every point of the railroad compass.
He had refused the space in the baggage car offered to him by the company;
it should: be a private car or nothing; and for that, in spite of all the
influence Gwynne and his powerful friends could bring to bear, he must
wait.
Meanwhile Gwynne had asked him to stay with himself and his mother, Lady
Victoria Gwynne, at the house of his fiancee, Isabel Otis, on Russian Hill;
a massive cliff rising above one of the highest of the city's northern
hills, whose old houses, clinging to its steep sides had escaped the fire
that roared about its base. To-day it was a green and lofty oasis in the
midst of miles of smoking ruins.
Gathbroke was as nervous as only a young Englishman within his immemorial
armor can be. Gwynne, who had gone through the same nerve-racking crisis,
although from different causes, understood what he suffered and pressed him
into service in the distribution of government rations, and garments to
the different refugee camps. But Gathbroke had the active imagination of
intelligent youth, and he never forgot to blame himself for lingering in
New York with some interesting chaps he had met on the _Majestic_, and
afterward in Southern California, seduced by its soft climate and violent
color.
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