She had arrived only a few hours ago, after two days spent at Del Monte, and was waiting for Nick.

There had been a note sent up the day before, and she had not been in the hotel twenty minutes when he had telephoned.  It had been good to hear his voice, so good that Angela had felt obliged to stiffen her resolution.  Would she let him call? he asked; and she said:  “Yes, come before dinner.”  Her impulse was to say, “Dine with me,” but she would not.  Instead, she added, “I dine at eight.”  It was now after seven, and she had dressed to be ready for Nick.  He might arrive at any minute.  Angela’s heart was beating quickly—­but perhaps it was the glory of the sunset that made her blood run fast.  She was listening for the bell of the telephone, yet when the sharp sound came it went through her nerves with the thrill of the unexpected.

“A gentleman, Mr. Hilliard, has called,” announced the small impersonal voice at the other end of the wire.

“Ask him to come up,” Angela answered, feeling virtuously firm in her resolve that really had not weakened once in the last five days!

The pretty white room was full of rose-coloured twilight, so pink, it seemed, that if you closed your hand tightly you might find a little ball of crushed rose-petals there when you opened it.  It would be a pity to shut out so much loveliness by switching on the electricity, so when Nick came he found Angela, a tall, slim black figure, with a faint gold nimbus round its head, silhouetted against a background of flaming sky.  Standing as she did with her back to the window, he could hardly see her face, but the sunset streamed full into his as he crossed the room, holding out his hand.

His dark face and deep-lighted eyes looked almost unearthly to Angela seen in this wonderful light.  No man could really be as handsome as he seemed!  She must remember that he had never been so before, never would be again.  It was only an effect.  “It’s like meeting him transformed, in another world,” was the thought that flashed through her head.  And the immense height of this great house on a hill, the apparent distance from the veiled city beneath, with its starlike lights beginning to glitter through clouds of shadow, all intensified the fancy.  For an instant it was as if they two met alone together on a mountain-top, immeasurably high above the tired, struggling crowd of human things where once their place had been.

Strange what fantastic ideas jump into your mind!  Angela was ashamed; and her embarrassment, mingling with admiration of Nick which must be hidden, chilled her greeting into commonplace.  Yet she could hardly take her eyes from his good looks.

Nick had dressed himself for evening in some of those clothes bought in haste, ready-made, to please a woman who had laughed at them and at him, during his abbreviated visit in New York.  The woman did not laugh now.  She forgot that she had ever laughed; and the thought was in her mind that the large white oval of evening shirt set off his head like a marble pedestal.