pathy with him in the shattering of his stage career, but had commended him for his renunciation, while through the letter had run a note of relief, which led John to discover for the first time that Bessie's concurrence in his dramatic ambitions was never without misgivings. True, she had told him this once, but it was when he had been too deaf to hear. What pleased John most in this correspondence was a pulse of happiness, quickening almost from letter to letter, which the big man felt revealed her perception of his growing love for her.
Perhaps it was this that put the past so far behind, that made it seem as though his love for Bessie had always been a part of his life, and the impulse to declare it a legitimate ripening of fruit that had grown slowly towards perfection.
In this mood a day was set when John would go to Los Angeles to visit Bessie. As the time approached, he could think of nothing else. On the morning of that day, the evening of which was to mark his departure, he was canvassing in Encina, a beautiful section of that urban population of several hundred thousand people across the Bay from San Francisco, the largest municipal unit of which is the City of Oakland. But thoughts of Bessie crowding in, so filled the lover's mind with rosy clouds that he had not enough of what salesmen call "closing power."
As it happened, a tiny park was just at hand, two blocks long and half a block wide, curved at the ends, dotted with graceful palms, with tall, shapely, shiny-leaved acacias, and covered with a thick sod of grass, laced at intervals by curving walks.
Upon a bench in the very center of this park Hampstead dropped down and gave himself up to blissful meditations. Across the street from him was a block of happy-looking cottage homes, the homes of the great middle-
