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floor crowded with crates and barrels not yet unpacked. Kendra liked to take her basket and browse in here. It was not a simple task, for as the boys unpacked they piled goods wherever they found space on the shelves, so that prunes and sardines stood among hatchets and shoes and candles; but she enjoyed it, especially when Ted had time to come in and help her.
    While Kendra chose the foodstuffs, Eva would often go shopping elsewhere. (It was not wise, she said, to give too much business to one firm.) Leaving Kendra in care of Mr. Chase, Eva would take both the army escorts with her. She did not want to be seen riding with only one man (she said this was all right for a young girl but not for a married woman; it might cause talk). On days when she did not leave the store Eva waited for Kendra in the front room. Seated on a box, with traders and officers around her, she laughed and chatted with them, her manner exquisitely balanced between an artless warmth and the reserve becoming a colonel’s wife.
    The door to the storeroom was always open, and Messrs. Chase and Fenway and the packing boys came in and out, but Ted and Kendra had many chances to talk. Ted was interesting, and he never spoke again of any “woman he used to know.” When the Cynthia sailed for Honolulu, Kendra did not miss her shipboard friends at all.
    The Cynthia left sooner than Captain Pollock had intended. Part of the ship’s cargo consisted of goods ordered by Honolulu merchants, but he had planned a longer delay in San Francisco, to give himself and his crew a rest. However, he was leaving now because the garrison at Monterey had sent up a plea for help.
    Captain Pollock told Kendra and Eva about this when he called to say goodby. He was in high spirits, laughing as he described his mission, for on shore Pollock was not as formal as he was at sea. He was being sent to Honolulu, he said, to get salt meat and dried split peas for the sailors on the battleships at Monterey.
    “The naval supply is running low,” he explained, “and the boys are grumbling. They hate all this fresh food from the ranches.”
    Kendra and Eva were surprised, but Pollock was not. Knowing seamen, he knew they liked the food they were used to at sea.
    He said he had been told to come back as soon as possible. An average voyage to Honolulu was three weeks each way, but the Cynthia would probably do better than this. As he talked, Kendra mischievously wondered if his good humor at leaving for Honolulu might not be due to the prospect of seeing that gambling hostess Loren had told her about. But the lieutenants were waiting to escort herself and Eva to the store, and Ted was there, and she hardly thought of Captain Pollock again.
    She was liking Ted more and more. At home, Kendra had met young men who flirted and told her she was pretty. But she was not used to having anybody, man or woman, take a genuine interest in her as a person who stood out from all the other people in the world. This was what Ted did. She found herself talking to him with more enjoyment than she had ever felt with anybody else.
    He was more interested in talking about her than about himself, but when she asked him he said he came from New York, where he had worked for a legal firm. Everybody had told him he had a fine chance to rise in the world. All he needed was diligence, promptness, perseverance, and various other virtues he did not possess. He had been utterly, unbearably bored.
    “So one day,” he said, “I took a ship for Honolulu.”
    They were in the storeroom. Kendra held her basket, while Ted was carrying a bag of new potatoes from Sutter’s Fort. Sutter’s launch had come down a few days before, and Ted had put aside these potatoes for her as soon as they were brought in. As he spoke, Ted shrugged.
    “There you have me, Kendra. Hasty, impetuous, reckless, no ambition to be President, just living life as it comes along.”
    They both laughed. Ted reminded her that tomorrow night was the