Burned Bridges

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.