“I don’t think I want——­” he began.  But Angela sternly caught his eye, mutely commanding him to eat.  When he had chosen several dishes at random, and the waiter had gone, she reproached him again.  “What would people think if you went away in the midst of dinner?  There’s a man opposite staring at us now!  You’re not as tactful as you were the night of the burglar.  Then, you did just the right thing, cleverly and bravely.  For that I can forgive you a good deal—­but not everything.  Now you make one blunder after another.”

“That night in New York you wanted me.  This time you don’t.  I guess that’s what makes the difference in the quality of my gray matter,” said Nick.  “I feel riddled with bullets, and they’ve hit me right where I live.  I—­I suppose you’ll never forgive me, will you?  If you only half guessed how little I meant to butt in, or be rude, or annoy you, maybe you could, though.”

“Maybe I can—­by and by; for the sake of your kindness in the past.”  Angela relented.  “But not even for that quite yet.  And not ever, if you look so stricken that you make people stare.”

“I am stricken,” Nick confessed.

“You deserve to be.”  She crushed him deeper into the mire.  Whereupon the soup arrived, and they began to eat, and talk politely.  Nick had never known before that a man could be wildly happy and desperately miserable at the same time, but now he knew.  And he would not have changed places with any other man in the world.  “I’m under a spell,” he said to himself, “and I wouldn’t get out of it if I could.”

At the same moment Angela conjectured that there must be something strange about the air she was breathing in this New World.  “It makes one want to act queerly,” she thought.  “I’m sure I should have acted quite differently about this whole affair in Europe.  It’s so easy to feel conventional in places where you’ve always lived, and where you know everybody.  Or is it only because this man’s so different from any one else?  I thought I was beginning to understand his nature, but now I see I don’t.  The thing is, I was too nice to him.  I oughtn’t to have asked him to lunch and dine in New Orleans.  That began the mischief.  And it was my fault more than his.”

But then, according to the man’s own confession, the mischief had begun in New York.  “I wish I could make myself enjoy snubbing the extraordinary creature,” she went on, as she ate her dinner, throwing an occasional sentence concerning the scenery, or, as a last resort, the weather, to her chastened companion.  “But it’s difficult to snub a person who’s saved your life and lent you money and found your gold bag.  That’s why he oughtn’t to have put me in this position—­because I owe him gratitude.  It’s really horrid.”  And she began to feel sincerely that the New Type had conducted itself unworthily.

She gave Nick a cool bow when she was ready to go, and left him plunged in gloom, but stubbornly unrepentant.  “It’s a tough proposition I’m up against,” he thought, “but a man’s as good as his nerve.  And I’ll fight till the next spring rains sooner than let her slip away out of my life.”