Equally sincere was he, though a little more thoughtful, in his severe self-examination of his deficiencies, when, later, he seated himself at the window with one hand softly encompassing his child's chubby fist in the crib beside him, and, in the instinctive fashion of all loneliness, looked out of the window.

The southern trades were whipping the waves of the distant bay and harbor into yeasty crests.

Sheets of rain swept the sidewalks with the regularity of a fusillade, against which a few pedestrians struggled with flapping waterproofs and slanting umbrellas.

He could look along the deserted length of Montgomery Street to the heights of Telegraph Hill and its long-disused semaphore.

It seemed lonelier to him than the mile-long sweep of Heavy Tree Hill, writhing against the mountain wind and its aeolian song.