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.