Angela did not tell Nick the excuse she offered Mrs. Harland for giving up her visit.  It was enough for him that it was given up.  He would have been even more proud and pleased, however, if he had known how frankly she confessed her real intentions.

To do that seemed to Angela the only way.  To have fibbed a little, or even to have prevaricated whitely, would have spoiled everything.

“I find, dear Mrs. Harland,” she said in her letter, “that I can’t tear myself from San Francisco.  If I go with you to Shasta and the McCloud River, and come back in a week or a fortnight to do my sightseeing, nothing will be the same.  I believe you will understand how I feel.  My impressions will be broken.  Besides, Mr. Hilliard is here now, and willing to show me what I ought to see.  I’m afraid I seemed to repay his kindness by being rude to him at Paso Robles.  After San Francisco, he volunteers to be my ‘trail guide’ through the Yosemite Valley, and if I put off that trip too long I mayn’t get so good a guide.  Mr. Morehouse has advised me to take him, and says these things are done in this Western World, where gossip is blown away like mist by the winds that sweep through the Golden Gate.  Besides, why should any one gossip?  There is no cause; and I am nobody, and known to few.  I’m not worth gossiping about!  But I wonder if you’ll ever again invite me to Rushing River Camp?  I hardly dare expect it.  Yet I hope!”

Already Mrs. Gaylor had been invited, and had accepted; but Angela was not thinking of Mrs. Gaylor at the moment, and she was doing her best to keep Nick’s thoughts from his “boss’s widow.”  He and “Mrs. May” went about San Francisco together like two children on a holiday.

The place was a surprise to Angela.  Her father’s stories had pictured for her a strange, wild city, of many wooden houses, a tangle of steep streets running up hill and down dale, a few great mansions, a thousand or more acres of park in the making.  But the San Francisco which he had known as a boy had greatly changed, even before the fire.  Angela was aware of this, though she had not been able to realize the vastness of the change; and though she knew that the city was reborn since the epic tragedy which laid it low, she had expected to find it in a confused turmoil of growing.  The work done in six or seven years by men who loved the City of the Golden Gate—­men who gave blood and fortune for her, as men will for an adored woman—­was almost incredible.  “Rome was not built in a day” she had often heard; but this great town of many hills, so like a Rome of a new world, seemed to have risen from its ashes by magic.