THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE BY WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1913, by WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY Copyright by Copyright, 1913, by EDWARD J. CLODE Copyright by THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN GATE CHAPTER I The general steamship agency on The Bund was a hive of bustling travelers, their faces alight with the eagerness with which they desired to be gone their many ways up and down the world. A stranger might have imagined that most of Yokohama's European or "white" population had been possessed of a sudden desire to flee beyond the seas. It was a scene common enough, however, for that season in the gateways of the Far East. Spring, with its heart call to distant homelands, had come again to break the spell of the Orient for many and to stir an unutterable longing in the breasts of others—the men and women who dream always of the day they will "go back," but who never do. The crowd was a conglomerate, as crowds go, and not lacking in picturesque touches—here where a Chinese of mandarin rank went with a silky retinue; there where a pair of turbaned Sikhs stood near two begoggled Korean priests, muttering in gutturals over their tickets for the South. The placidity and impenetrable calm of these few Oriental faces served but to accentuate the mobile expressiveness of the dominant Caucasian countenance. Still there was one white man whose features betrayed no expression of interest in the