A singularly sympathetic and apparently intelligent hotel clerk not only advised a motor for sightseeing in the neighbourhood, but recommended one owned and invented by a friend.  It was a “clipper,” he said; could do anything but climb trees or jump brooks, and might be hired by Mrs. May, at a reasonable price, for a day, a week, a month, a year.  Angela felt bound to say that she should like to see it; and—­almost before the last word was out of her mouth—­the garage was rung up by telephone.

The car arrived with startling promptness, and if Angela had been given time to think it might have occurred to her that there was not, perhaps, as much competition for this new invention as the hotel clerk had implied.  The inventor, who was driver and chauffeur as well, bore a striking resemblance to a sulky codfish, but his half-boiled eyes lighted up and glittered (even as his car glittered with blue paint), at the prospect of business.  Other vehicles were now being produced by a firm who had bought his patent, said he, but at present his own; appropriately named the “Model,” was the “only one running.”  He lifted the brilliant bonnet, and revealed intricate things, all new and silvery and glistening like crystallized sugar.  Angela fell an easy victim.  She knew nothing about the mechanical virtues and vices of cars, though she had two at home for her own use, and the Prince a dozen, valued only less than his aeroplanes.  Hers had been gray and dark green.  She had always wanted a blue car, and this was a lovely colour.  Though she was no more vain than a pretty young woman ought to be, she consented to an experimental run, with an undertone of conviction that the car would become her as a background.

As she made her decision, Kate arrived, breathless with the excitement of bargaining, to find her mistress on the curbstone.

“Oh, ma’am!” she panted.  “I’ve done it!  I’ve got five hundred dollars in me pocket!”

“And they’ve got the bag,” Angela regretfully murmured.

“Yes, ma’am, they have.  Unless they’ve sold it since.  Such a fine jewellery shop.  The name an Oirish one, and I went there first, for luck.  Then I tried another place, but they offered less, and I ran back to Barrymore’s.  They said ’twas a splendid bag, and they’d ’a give more, but they haven’t the same call for the article as if ’twas Paris or New York; and they must make their profit.”

“No doubt they will make it,” Angela almost snapped.  She felt as a certain type of woman feels on hearing that the first man who ever proposed to her has married some one else.  And when the codfish, whose name was Sealman, asked her where she would go for a trial spin, she said that he might take her to the shop of Barrymore the jeweller.  But that was when Kate had disappeared into the hotel.

The automobile ran quietly, and the springs, as the codfish said, were “grasshoppers.”  The motor made a pleasant purring, not much louder than Timmy’s when you scratched his head through the open roof of his basket.  It was a small car, but as Angela wanted it only to run about the neighbouring country, keeping Los Angeles as a centre, she began to think that she might as well engage it.  After the poor codfish had given her this run for nothing, how could she disappoint him?