He watched her face fearfully, as he ventured this, never having dared as much before; and seeing that she turned away, he drew her attention to El Capitan, grandest of the near mountains.  Nick had been reading The Cid, trying to “worry through it in the old Spanish,” he explained; and the idea had come into his head that the mountain might have been named by some Spaniard for “El Gran Capitan.”  “You see, it’s too big and important for an everyday Captain.  But it’s just right for El Gran Capitan:  don’t you think so?”

Angela did think so, as he suggested it, though she remembered next to nothing about The Cid.  But Nick’s knowledge of history, which had amazed her once, pleased without surprising her now.  She began to take his knowledge of most things for granted.  Here in the Yosemite Valley he could teach and show her much that she might have missed but for him, and his similes showed habits of thought with which a few weeks ago she would not have credited the ex-cowboy.  He made the mountains take shape for her as gods and heroes of Indian legends; he told her of the Three Graces, and the Three Brothers, grim as gray monks, who threw glances over their round shoulders at the Graces; and there was no drama or tragedy of the valley that he did not know from its first act to the last.

In the afternoon the stage rushed them past a charming camp in the woods, to the Sentinel Hotel, at the foot of the Yosemite Falls.  Angela was given a room opening on to a veranda, and waiting for Nick to bring her some word from Kate, by telephone, she stood looking up at the immeasurable height of the cataract, which loomed white across a brown sweep of trout-haunted river.  “It’s like a perpendicular road of marble going up to heaven,” she thought; and as she gazed, down that precipice of snow came tumbling a white shape as of a giant bear, striving desperately to save itself, hanging for an instant on the brink of the vast gulf, then letting go hopelessly and plunging over.

Angela stepped out on the veranda to talk with Hilliard when he came, and though shocked to hear that Kate could not arrive that night, was glad to know her safe.  Nick had arranged that Kate should meet her mistress at Glacier Point next day.  “And so,” he said, “there’s nothing to bother about, if you can do without her for this one night.  I hope you don’t mind much, for I feel it was my fault.  I ought to have managed better.”

“I don’t mind in the least,” Angela was beginning to console him, when suddenly she broke off with an “Oh!” of dismay, clasping her hands together.

“What’s the matter?” Nick questioned anxiously.

“Nothing.  Nothing at all.”

“But there is something, Mrs. May.  You must tell me, and I’ll try to make it right.”

“What shops are there here?” she asked by way of answer.

“Oh, you can buy photographs and souvenirs, and candy and drugs, I expect.”