blue lake and a black desert created by a rain of oil, a forest of derricks, like a scattered group of burnt fir-trees with low-hung bare branches.  But instead of these his mind’s eye saw a new road, shaded by walnuts and oaks, that marched in long straight lines between rough pasture and irrigated land.  He saw in the tree-shadows a yellow motor-car drawn up by the side of the road, and in it a beautiful, pale girl, hatless, with disordered golden hair and a torn white dress.  He saw a man with the girl, and heard her say that it would have been better to die than let herself care for him.

“Yet she did care for me,” Nick told himself obstinately.  “There’s no getting over that.  She said, ‘You mustn’t think I don’t care.’” And even if she hadn’t said it, there was that look in her eyes.  Could he ever forget the look, or cease to thrill at the memory?  No; he knew that he could not, till the hour of his death.  “It was because I’m not of her world, that she couldn’t bear to let herself go, and love me as she was beginning to love me, I know,” he thought, as he had thought countless times before, in the weeks since he had quietly let her go out of his life.  “I’m not what she’s been brought up to call a gentleman,” his mind went on drearily preaching to him.  “I suppose I can’t realize the bigness and deepness of the gulf between us, as she sees it.  I’ve only my own standards to judge by.  Hers are mighty different.  I knew there was a gulf, but I hoped love would bridge it.  She thought no bridge could be strong enough for her to walk on to me.  I wonder if she thinks the same yet, or if the feeling I have sometimes, that she’s calling to me from far off, means anything?  I told her that day I’d feel her thinking of me across the world.  Well—­what if she’s thinking of me now?”

Nick had often debated this subject, and looked at it from every point of view; for after the first blow over the heart, a dim, scarcely perceptible light of hope had come creeping back to him.  Knowing from her words, and better still from her eyes, that Angela had cared a little, at least enough to suffer, Nick had wondered whether he might not make himself more acceptable to her than he had been.

He did not disparage himself with undue humility in asking this question.  He knew that he was a man, and that honour and strength and cleanness of living counted for something in this world.  But if he could become more like the men she knew—­in other words, a gentleman fit to mate with a great lady—­what then?

For Nick was aware that his manners were not polished.  In what Mrs. May would call “society,” no doubt he would be guilty of a thousand mistakes, a thousand awkwardnesses.  If he did anything rightly it would be by instinct—­instinct implanted by generations of his father’s well-born, well-bred ancestors—­rather than from knowledge of what was conventionally the “proper thing.”  If Angela had let love win, perhaps she might often