If the young man’s clothes were modern, they were far from being fashionable; not at all the sort of clothes to suit the background of a marble hall in a New York hotel.  His shirt was of some soft white material which did not seem to be starched, and a low collar was turned down over a black, loosely tied cravat like a sailor’s.  Instead of a waistcoat he wore a leather belt, of the sort in which one would quite expect to see a knife or revolver sticking out.  His blue serge suit was of a country cut, the trousers rather short and tight for the long, straight legs; and the shoes were wide in the toe, thick in the sole.

All these details Angela noted in one quick glance; and admiring the tall brown eccentricity as she might have admired a fine bronze statue out of place, in the wrong surroundings, she wondered from what sort of niche the statue had transplanted itself.  In her mind there was no room whatever for the little man with the pointed moustache, so she forgot his existence.

“Mighty pleased to—­do any service for you, lady,” stammered the bronze statue, and though his voice was pleasant, it had not the cultured accent to which Angela was accustomed.  Besides, it was quaint to be addressed as “lady.”  London cabbies and beggars called one “lidy”; but they were a law unto themselves.  Still it sounded rather nice as he said it:  “pleased to do any service for you, lady.”

She nodded politely as she moved away, following the bellboy who had the key of her rooms, and as she reached the lift, something made her glance back.  The sombrero was on the dark head again, and the head was bent over the hotel register, where Mrs. May had written her name.  The man was either looking at that or writing his own.  Angela inclined to the latter supposition.  Probably this wild creature of forests had just arrived in New York from somewhere very far away, perhaps from her father’s Golden West, the country of the sun.  As the lift flashed her with horrifying swiftness up to the twelfth floor, she still seemed to hear the echo of the pleasant voice, saying “Pleased to do any service for you, lady.”  A few minutes later, however, she forgot the incident of the dropped bag in admiring her pretty suite of white and green rooms, the bath, and the cedar-lined wardrobes in the wall, which she remembered as typically American.  She felt like a child examining a new playhouse.  Suddenly she was sure that she would get on well with Americans, that she would like them, and they her, though until to-day she had been afraid that her country-people, in their own land, would seem to her like strangers.  Although she had not made up her mind how long she would stay in New York before going West, she unpacked a great many things without stopping to think that perhaps she was giving herself useless trouble.  Then, when she had scattered quantities of dresses, petticoats, hats, and cloaks in both rooms, she paused bewildered.  Everything she had taken out on shipboard looked wrinkled and rather haggard.  She wished, after all, that she had brought Josephine, though she had not been fond of her, or of the others.  She did not know what to do with the things, and never could she get them all back again when it should be time to leave the hotel!  It was as Josephine had prophesied.  How the Frenchwoman would enjoy saying, “It is as I warned Madame la Princesse!”