“Frank!  For God’s sake!” Windham’s fingers gripped his nephew’s arm.  “Don’t let Maizie know.  I’ve tried to live it down these twenty years....”

“Damn it, do you think I’d tell Aunt Maizie?”

“It’s—­I can’t believe it yet!  That you—­”

“Maizie wouldn’t leave her mother.”  With a flicker of defiance Robert answered him.  “I was young, rudderless, after my people went East....  A little wild, I guess.”

“So you sought consolation?”

“Call it what you like,” the other answered.  “Some things are too strong for men.  They overwhelm one—­like Fate.”

Frank began pacing back and forth, his fingers opening and shutting spasmodically.

“Uncle Bob,” he said at length, “... after you married, what became—­”

“Her mother sent the child East—­to a sister.  She was well raised—­educated.  If she’d only stayed there, in that Massachusetts town!”

“Then—­Bertha didn’t know?”

“Not till she came to San Francisco, after her mother’s death.  She had to come to settle the estate.  The mother left her everything—­a string of tenements.  She was rich.”

“Bertha came to you, then, I suppose.”

“Yes, she came to me,” said Robert Windham.

Suddenly, as though the memory overwhelmed him, Windham’s face sank forward in his hands.

“She was very sweet,” his voice broke pitifully.  “I—­loved her.”

* * * * *

Several days later Frank and his father paid a visit to the ruined city.  One had to get passes in Oakland and wear them on one’s hat.  Sightseers were not admitted nor carried on ferry boats, trains.

Already Telegraph Hill was dotted with new habitations.  It was rumored that Andrea Sbarbora, banker and patron of the Italian Colony, was bringing a carload of lumber from Seattle which he would sell to fire sufferers on credit and at cost.  The spirit of rehabilitation was strong.

Frank was immensely cheered by it.  But Francisco was overwhelmed by the desolation.  “I am going South,” he told his son.  “I can’t bear to see this.  I don’t even know where I am.”

It was true.  One felt lost in those acres of ashes and debris.  Familiar places seemed beyond memorial reconstruction, so smitten was the mind by this horror of leveled buildings, gutted walls and blackened streets.

Francisco and Jeanne went to San Diego.  There the former tried to refashion the work of many months—­two hundred pages of a novel which the flames destroyed.  Robert Windham and his family journeyed to Hawaii.  Frank did not see his uncle after that talk in the Berkeley Hills.

Parks and public spaces were covered with little green cottages in orderly rows.  Refugee camps one termed then and therein lived 20,000 of the city’s homeless.

Street cars were running.  Passengers were carried free until the first of May.  Patrick Calhoun was trying to convert the cable roads into electric lines in spite of the objection of the improvement clubs.  He was negotiating with the Supervisors for a blanket franchise to electrize all of his routes.