The journey, too, had prepared her for the isolation that she craved; the glimpse of tragic Donner Lake, where the pioneers starved and agonized in 1848; the wild Truckee River sweeping its flood past thickets of pale sagebrush and forests of black pines; the tang of cold and the smell of snow in the air; the lonely farmhouses folded among green hills; and the primitive look of Truckee town with its little frame buildings called by pretentious foreign names; Firenze Saloon; Roma Hotel.

Nobody else, however, seemed to have the half-sad, half-delicious sense of remoteness from the world, at Tahoe, which Angela had.  That month was very gay, and the immense verandas of the tavern were flower-gardens of pretty girls—­those American “summer girls,” of whom Angela had often heard.  They swam, and boated and fished, and, above all, flirted, for there were always plenty of men; and in the evenings they danced in the ballroom of the casino, built on the edge of the water.

Angela never tired of going from end to end of the lake in the steamboat that set out from the tavern jetty in the morning and returned in the afternoon.  The captain, a great character, let her sit in a room behind the pilot-box, where her luncheon was brought by an eager-eyed youth working his way through college by serving as steward in the holidays.  He was in love with a girl at his university, equally poor and equally plucky; but because she was earning dollars as a waitress at the tavern, the boy thought Tahoe a place “where you couldn’t help being happy.”  Angela thought it a place where, more than most others, it might be possible to find peace, though happiness was gone.

She no longer opened her diary.  Never again, she told herself, would she keep a record of her days.  But, some time—­years from now, maybe—­when she could read what she had written without a heartache, she would open the unfinished volume where she had broken off a sentence in the great redwood forest.  She might be able to think of Nick Hilliard then without longing for him; but that time seemed far, very far away.

* * * * *

One August evening Angela came back from an excursion to the top of Mount Tallac.  She was tired, and had made up her mind to dine in her own sitting-room, then to go immediately to bed; but asking for her key she was told that “a lady was waiting to see her; had been waiting nearly all day.”

“A lady!” she echoed.  Could it be Mrs. Gaylor?  Angela hoped not; for, though she had not heard from Nick those things which Carmen had feared and expected her to hear, she guessed something of Carmen’s hate.  The fact that she had not been allowed to go back; that Kate had arrived in Bakersfield with a story of Mrs. Gaylor’s being called suddenly away from home; that Carmen had never answered a short letter she wrote; all these things roused her suspicions.  Indeed, she had even gone so far as to associate the box of poison-oak leaves with Mrs. Gaylor; and now the thought that the Spanish woman might have followed her to Tahoe sent a shiver through her veins.  Who could the lady be, if not Carmen Gaylor?  Who but Carmen would wait patiently for her coming, through a whole day?