"Let's retint the whole lower floor, Crete," he suggested, seizing upon the first change of topic that offered itself. "Now that this place is to be a home again and not a sanitarium, let's retint and get the public institution smell out of it."
She laid down the ivory brush and turned to him. But her gaze was abstracted, and when she spoke in a musing voice, her words showed that she had not been listening. "Clinton, have you ever figured out just how much of the Coalinga oil stock belongs to me?"
He had been sitting with one knee hugged between his arms. Now he released it and brought himself upright upon the cedar chest.
"Why, no, I haven't. I don't think it makes much difference, while we're living together, sharing everything this way."
She got up from the dressing-table and walked over to the far window, drawing the deep lace collar of the amethyst negligée up about her ears as though to screen herself from his view. Out on the bay the lighted ferry-boats plied their silent passage, and on the Key Route pier an orange-colored train crawled cautiously, like a brilliant caterpillar, across a thread of track. Marcreta, gazing out into the clear soft dusk, sent a question backward over her shoulder.
"Would it be very much trouble to go over our properties some time and--make a division?"
"No, it wouldn't be much trouble, and I suppose it would be much more businesslike." He spoke briskly but she knew that her demand had astonished him. "You know," he admitted ruefully, "I don't pretend to be much of a business man. I think you may be right to insist upon an accounting."
"O Clint! I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that." Her voice held the stricken tone of the sensitive nature stabbed by the swift realization that it has hurt some one else. "You've been the best brother a girl ever had. You've been too good to me. I didn't mean _that_ at all."
Her answer seemed to grope its way through an underbrush of tangled emotions. "I just thought it would be well for us each to know what we have because--you see, we may not always be living together like this."
A month had passed since Kenwick became a member of the staff of the "San Francisco Clarion." The work had been going well, and the perpetual small excitement of a newspaper office brought back some of the old thrill that he had known in his college days. But every emotion came in subdued form now. There was a shadow across his sky, a soft pedal applied to every emotion. And until this was lifted he resolved to deny himself a sight of the house on Pine Street.