Unquestionably, if he had stayed on his job, as these expressive
Americans put it, his sister would have been in New York, possibly on the
Atlantic Ocean when San Francisco shook herself to ruin.
"But not necessarily alive," said Lady Victoria callously, removing her
cigar, her heavy eyes that looked like empty volcanos, staring down over
the smoldering waste. "People with heart disease don't invariably wait for
an earthquake to jolt them out of life. Assume that her time had come and
think of something else or you'll become a silly ass of a neurotic."
Gwynne, more sympathetic, continued to find him what distraction he could,
and one day drove him down the Peninsula with a message from the Committee
of Fifty to Tom Abbott; who had caught a heavy cold during those three days
when he had driven a car filled with dynamite and had had scarcely an hour
for rest. He was now at home in bed.
II
The Abbott's place, Rincona, stood on a foothill behind the other estates
of Alta and surrounded by a park of two hundred acres set thick with
magnificent oaks. Gathbroke had never seen finer ones in England or France.
Gwynne before entering the avenue drove to an elevation above the house and
stopped the car for a moment.
The great San Mateo valley looked like a close forest of ancient oaks
broken inartistically by the roofs of houses shorn of their chimneys.
Beyond, on the eastern side of a shallow southern arm of the Bay of San
Francisco, was the long range of the Contra Costa mountains, its waving
indented slopes incredibly graceful in outline and lovely in color.
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