Street property for the rest of her life.  She and Mrs. Smiley persuaded him to dine with them, and he thought it quite characteristic of “Aunt Ide” to make a little occasion of it, and take them to a certain favored little French restaurant for the meal.  But Mrs. Smiley was tremulous with gratitude and relief, Russell’s face was radiant, his adoring eyes all for Barry, and Barry, always willing to accept a situation gracefully, really enjoyed his dinner.

He stayed in San Francisco another day and went to Hetty’s grave, high up in the Piedmont Hills, and took a long lonely tramp above the college town afterward.  Early the next morning he started for home, fresh from a bath and a good breakfast, and feeling now, for the first time, that he was free, and that it was good to be free—­ free to work and to plan his life, and free, his innermost consciousness exulted to realize, to go to her some day, the Lady of his Heart’s Desire, and take her, with all the fragrance and beauty that were part of her, into his arms.  And oh, the happy years ahead; he seemed to feel the sweetness of spring winds blowing across them, and the glow of winter fires making them bright!  What of her fabulous wealth, after all, if he could support her as she chose to live, a simple country gentle-woman, in a little country town?

Barry stared out at the morning fields and hills, where fog and sunshine were holding their daily battle, and his heart sang within him.

Fog held the field at Santa Paloma when he reached it, the station building dripped somberly.  Main Street was but a line of vague shapes in the mist.  No grown person was in sight, but Barry was not ten feet from the train before a screaming horde of small boys was upon him, with shouted news in which he recognized the one word, over and over:  “Fire!”

It took him a few minutes to get the sense of what they said.  He stared at them dully.  But when he first repeated it to himself aloud, it seemed already old news; he felt as if he had known it for a very long time:  “The mail office caught fire yesterday, and the whole thing is burned to the ground.”

“Caught fire yesterday, and the whole thing is burned to the ground:  yes, of course,” Barry said.  He was not conscious of starting for the scene, he was simply there.  A fringe of idle watchers, obscured in the fog, stood about the sunken ruins of what had been the mail building.  Barry joined them.

He did not answer when a dozen sympathetic murmurs addressed him, because he was not conscious of hearing a single voice.  He stood silently, looking down at the twisted great knots of metal that had been the new presses, the great wave of soaked and half-burned newspapers that had been the last issue of the mail.  The fire had been twenty-four hours ago, but the ruins were still smoking.  Lengths of charred woodwork, giving forth a sickening odor, dripped water still; here and there brave little spurts of flame still sucked noisily.  A twisted typewriter stood erect in steaming ashes; a lunch-basket, with a red, fringed napkin in it, had somehow escaped with only a wetting.  Barry noticed that the walls of the German bakery next door were badly singed, that one show-window was cracked across, and that the frosted wedding-cake inside stood in a pool of dirty water.