bass of Gus Peters, that hardy pioneer who had turned a wing of his livery stable into the first garage of the town. But he kept his counsel—the boy would be out of harm's way soon.
Still, as she flung herself like a full-fed panther on the bed in her hotel room, Carlotta was rather pleased with herself, that is as long as she could shut out that warning prophecy which sometimes threatened to become an obsession. Her heartache was lost in the sense of the dramatic, in her delighted approval of the makeup of the loungers in the hotel, small-part people in the production she was staging. The situation held sufficient of both tragedy and farce to satisfy the most jaded appetite, and there was promised a most astonishing denouement and curtain, that night. On this she was determined. She would ring it down herself if necessary.
She was not sensing the loveliness of the quiet gardens behind the houses on the street, the sweet old people that worked or drowsed in them, the green roofs of the trees lining the street, and the irregular angles of the housetops sloping down to the sea. That she refused even to look at.
This scene was just what Sally was gazing at so mournfully, a bare half mile away. Now if she had met Carlotta, she never could have understood this distressing slant at the place and people she herself loved so well. Not that Carlotta was exactly a viper, to transform this Eden into an inferno. MacAllister might qualify for such a rôle—not she. But wherever Carlotta went, she could, and did, manage to add a touch of burlesque. Very swiftly she could turn an exquisite
