“All right, then.  In four days like that you’ll be a dandy driver, I promise you, Mr. Hilliard,” said the man of the garage.

“Fit to drive—­ladies?”

“Fit to drive a queen.”

“That’s what I want to do,” mumbled Nick under his breath.

X

WHEN ANGELA WENT SIGHTSEEING

The next five days Angela spent in seeing the country her father had helped to create, and in breaking down in the blue motor-car at brief and inconvenient intervals.  At first they were unexpected intervals; but soon they were taken for granted; for the more she knew of Mr. Sealman’s invention the less was Angela surprised at anything it chose to do.  The Model was a model of all the vices.  It smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and developed, one after another or all together, every malady to which motor-metal is heir.  The stages of the way, even to the Mission of San Gabriel, in its sleepy old Mexican village on the fringe of Los Angeles, were punctuated with disasters.  A burst tire was a comma; carburetor trouble a colon; nervous prostration of the sparking-plug a period.  But Mr. Sealman never lost confidence.  He explained everything, justified himself and the car; told anecdotes of his courage, and let fall pathetic words concerning an invalid mother dependent on him and his success.

“I’m a pioneer, I tell you,” he said.  “You and I are making history this minute.”

Angela would gladly have turned from so lurid an occupation to any other pursuit; but Mr. Sealman looked as if his health were more fragile than that of the car.  When he clawed obscurely at the crystallized sugar ornaments under the bright bonnet of the fainting Model, his air looked so dejected, his eyes so hollow, and his smile so wan that Angela’s fury melted into pity.  Passionate resolves to shed him and his blue abomination died within her as she watched his struggles.  His whole future depended, he said, on the Model.  If Mrs. May should throw him over and hire another car, the news would fly like lightning from garage to garage of Los Angeles; indeed, from end to end of California.  He would be ruined.  His mother, who had been forbidden excitement, would, without doubt, die of heart failure.

The heart of Angela failed also, again and yet again.  She began to see that Mr. Sealman had cast himself for the part of Old Man of the Sea, in a travel drama of which she was heroine.  She felt alone in the world.  “It will probably end in my having to buy the little blue brute and burn it,” she thought.  “But even then the codfish will probably insist on being my butler.”