“Does she come back into the crystal?” Carmen had asked, eagerly.

“No.  I can see you now.  But she doesn’t come back.”

“And Nick?  Do you find him?”

Madame Vestris knew very well who “Nick” was.

During the last three or four years she had replied to a great many questions about Nick Hilliard, and her answers had brought her a goodly number of ten-dollar bills.  For crystal-gazing her charge was ten dollars:  with a trance in addition, twenty-five.

“I see a man standing beside you.  But he is in deep shadow.  I can’t make out who it is.”

Carmen revived.  “It must be Nick.  There’s no other man I can think of I would let come near me.”

When she called to Hilliard in the Mariposa Grove, and his answering call told her where to look, Carmen was even more anxious to see what Mrs. May was like than to meet Nick himself, though it seemed years since the night when she bade him good-bye, full of hope, believing he would come back to her.

The two were standing under the Grizzly Giant when she came up to them, Nick a few steps in advance, because he had started to meet his old friend, and a sickly pang shot through Carmen’s heart as she saw Angela, tall and white in the rose-and-silver twilight.  She had to admit the enemy’s beauty; and with a sharp stab of pain she remembered Nick’s description of “the angel of his dreams.”  Yes, this white, slender creature was like a man’s idea of an angel.  Here was Nick’s ideal made human.  Carmen wished that the Grizzly Giant might fall on the angel and crush her to death, a lingering death of agony; because nothing less could satisfy a woman’s longing for revenge.  Nor was death enough to atone Carmen would have chosen to see Angela die disfigured, so that Nick should remember her hideous through the years to come.  Desiring this eagerly, and all other evils, Mrs. Gaylor was, nevertheless, polite and pleasant to Mrs. May.  She came out from the tragic shadow which had enveloped her like a mourning mantle, and wondered at herself, hearing the sweet tones of her own voice.  She began by explaining to Nick that she had not been well; that her doctor had recommended her to try a change of air, and that she had thought of the Yosemite.  “I’ve always wanted to see the valley ever since you came back and talked so much about it,” she went on.

“Then, when I got to Wawona I heard you were there.  I was surprised!  Do you realize, you only wrote to me once, and never told me any of your plans?  I should have thought you were in New York to this day if I hadn’t run up to the Falconers’ place on the McCloud River not very long ago, and found out that you’d been in Santa Barbara.  I suppose this lady is Mrs. May, a friend of that fascinating Miss Dene?  She, or some of the people up there, told me that you’d promised to show her round California.”

As Carmen waited to be introduced, she glanced sharply from one to the other, to see if they looked self-conscious, but they wore an air of innocence that made Carmen long to strike Nick and trample on the woman.  How dared they act as if she had no right to resent their being here together?  Yet she did not want them to know, just now, that she did resent it.