Suddenly, she ceased to enjoy her isolation.  For the first time since leaving Rome “on a long visit to relatives in America” (according to newspaper paragraphs), the Princess di Sereno did not hug her loneliness and her secret.  She hardly knew what to do as she stood under the big letter “M” waiting to have her luggage examined.  Her fellow “M’s” as well as all the other letters appeared to be having desperate trouble with the custom-house men, who clawed out the contents of their trunks and then calmly left the cowed owners to stuff everything back as best they could.

Angela’s heart beat fast when her turn came, and she wished for long-nosed, hard-voiced Josephine as a bulwark; but the ordeal was not as bad as she expected.  She looked at her inquisitor with the air of a hunted child who had got lost and hardly hoped ever to be found; so the protective instincts were aroused, and the wind was tempered to the shorn lamb.  In half an hour after the ship had docked, Mrs. May was inquiring of a large, obliging Irishman (who had a vast store of knowledge concerning all useful subjects) how on earth she was to secure a cab.

Her hotel was decided upon, and rooms engaged.  An old friend of Mrs. Merriam, a cosmopolitan American woman, had once praised the Hotel Valmont, Angela had remembered; and driving from Twenty-third Street up into the Forties, New York was almost as strange to her as if she had never seen it before.  Indeed, she had seen little of it, for the Merriams had lived in Boston, and Angela was only eleven when she bade her father and America good-bye.  How vividly that day came back to her now!  She could see her father, and feel his kisses as he said, “Never mind, little girl.  When mother brings you back then we’ll have the time of our lives—­just you and I—­in California together.”

But that day did not bear thinking of.  And, by and by, rattling through the bright, busy streets, in the vivifying sunshine, she began to feel happy again, as well as very young and eager.

“This is the gate of my future, and I’m driving into it,” she thought.

The Hotel Valmont, which Mrs. Corning had said was small, loomed imposing to Angela’s eyes, as her taxicab stopped before the ever-revolving glass wheel of the Fifth Avenue door.  The building towered to a height of sixteen or seventeen storeys at least, and appeared only a lesser mountain among mountains.

A polite man in livery bowed her through the swift whirl of the glass wheel, and she found herself in a large hall with floor and walls of marble.  Formally cut laurel-trees grew in huge pots, and the gilded ceiling was higher than those of the Palazzo di Sereno.

There were many desks, and she explained to one of a dozen clerks that she was Mrs. A.V.  May, who had cabled for a bedroom and sitting-room.