Angela hesitated.  In California, at most times of year, it is hopeless to use the weather as a handle to hang an excuse upon.  She looked at the sky.  It was a vast inverted cup of turquoise.

“Are you sure the car is equal to so long a run?” she asked mildly.

The likeness between Mr. Sealman and a codfish became so marked that Angela feared he was going to be ill.

“You don’t know what the car can do,” he answered reproachfully.

“Perhaps not,” she admitted.  “Very well, we’ll start at eight.”

“Better make it earlier.”

She made it earlier, and was actually ready; but at half-past eight Sealman appeared on foot.  Of the car’s health he said nothing, but of his mother’s health he said much.  She had suffered a relapse.  The doctor had been with her all night.  How Sealman was going to pay the bill he did not know.  Would Mrs. May go to Santa Catalina Island this morning, and to Riverside to-morrow?  There was time to catch the boat.

The doctor’s bill was a trump card.  Angela consented to wait for Riverside, and she took Kate to that fair island loved by Californians, and by fishermen all over the world.

The name Avalon alone would have lured her; for who would not set sail for Avalon at a moment’s notice?

Santa Catalina is Corsica in miniature, Corsica without Napoleon or vendetta.  But it has sea-gardens, fathoms deep under green water, where flowers bloom and fish glitter in a dazzle of jewelled armour beneath the glass floors of flat-bottomed boats.  The fishermen were catching yellow-tail that day, too, just as Franklin Merriam had caught them in his time; and his daughter went back to Los Angeles full of thoughts of him.

To-morrow was to be held sacred to her father’s memory; for his old home, vanished off the face of the earth now, had been near Riverside.  Angela wanted the day to be perfect, unmarred by trouble or vexation; and though she had her fears, when morning came the Model started off so well that hope began to rise.

Making a detour, they spun past the old Mission San Gabriel, where she had arrived ignominiously by trolley four days ago; and turning for a look at the facade, Angela saw a yellow car drawn up in the fleecy shadow of a pepper-tree.  A chauffeur sat next the driver’s empty seat, apparently half asleep.

“That’s the motor I wanted to ask you about, a day or two ago,” Angela said, bending forward to speak to Sealman—­for she had kept her resolution to sit behind him.  “It’s the handsomest I’ve seen; and we’ve met it several times; two men in it always, in chauffeur’s caps and goggles.”

“Oh, that car!” remarked the inventor with indifference.  “That’s what we call Smith’s Folly.  Thad Smith, a fellow who made a pile of money, had the thing built to order, and it brought him bad luck—­lost every cent the day she was finished, and he’s been trying to sell her ever since. I wouldn’t take her for a present.”