These gloomy forebodings shadowed her mind one morning when the Model broke down about half a mile from fantastic little Venice, the Coney Island of South California.  In a rage she got out and walked, past a kaleidoscopic pattern of tiny bazaars, shooting-galleries, paper icebergs, and cardboard mountains.  She threaded her way through a good-natured crowd of tall, tanned young Americans, pretty girls with wonderful erections of golden hair, dark-faced Mexicans, yellow-faced Japanese, a few Hindus and negroes.  Then, by the pier, she saw an old Spanish galleon disguised as a restaurant, and drifted in to lunch on fried sand-dabs attractively advertised in big black letters.  How old, how Spanish, and how galleon the craft might really be, none could tell—­or would.  But the sand-dabs were delicious; and from the queer window near her table—­a window cut in the ship’s side—­she could see the Pacific, blue in distance, green where it tossed white foam-blossoms on a beach of gold.

“Breakdowns would be fun if I’d some one to laugh at them with me,” she thought; and her mind conjured up the image of Nick Hilliard, seating him opposite her at the little table.

She had ordered him home and he had apparently obeyed; which seemed unkind and poor-spirited, and altogether unlike him.  Ever until now he had been at hand to save her from all that was disagreeable.  Even at Los Angeles he had jumped off the train to circumvent Mr. Millard.  His ways had been like the ways of story-book heroes, who, by some extraordinary coincidence, invariably appear in time to rescue the heroine from a villain, a mad bull, a runaway horse or a burning house.  The only difference was that Mr. Hilliard could not possibly be the hero of this story, and his opportune arrival was, on his own confession, never a coincidence.  He came on purpose; and that was bad taste.  But as he had done it so often, why couldn’t he have transgressed just once again, to rescue her from Sealman?

She thought of the tall forest creature with yearnings, which interfered with her appetite for sand-dabs.  He might unobtrusively have stayed, she thought, and put himself at her service.  Not the most clinging Old Man of the Sea could continue to cling if that square-chinned bronze statue pointed out the wisdom of letting go.  But no doubt he was at home near Bakersfield, before this—­Angela seldom named Nick in her mind—­otherwise she must have run across him somewhere that first day at the City of the Angels when she had spun gaily from park to park, the Model for once behaving well.  Almost, she had expected to see him the next morning when the car refused to move, and she had taken a trolley car, halfway to San Gabriel.  It would have seemed appropriate, somehow, to meet him strolling in front of the Mission, his hands in his pockets, gazing up at the beautiful half-ruined facade, with its delicate chain-armour of gold lichen, its tower, and its flowers like blossoming barnacles.