“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Angela insisted, laughing within herself because he had not seen Theo’s manoeuvres.  “Of course they want you.”  She could not add what was in her mind.  “Anyway, Miss Dene does.”  As for Carmen, Angela had no idea that the invitation was to be extended to her, and the figure of Mrs. Gaylor, who, according to Theo, intended to marry Hilliard, loomed less important than after listening to Miss Dene’s gossip.  Of course, it would be a good thing for him to care for Mrs. Gaylor, and if she were really nice, to marry her in the end.  Only, when a young woman is in a motor-car with a handsome “forest creature” who appears to live only for her pleasure, she does not think much beyond the hour.  For that hour he may be hers, and hers alone, though to-morrow they part; and she shuts her eyes to anything so far away, so out of the picture, as an “end.”

“I’m not Mrs. Harland’s kind,” Nick explained; “nor Falconer’s, though he’s too big a man to care for what people call ‘social distinctions.’  They’d be kind to me if I went, and wouldn’t let me feel any difference they could help.  But there’d be a house-party, maybe, and I wouldn’t know any one.  I’d be ‘out of it.’  I couldn’t stand for that, Mrs. May.”

“You’re sensitive,” Angela said.

“In some ways,” Nick admitted.  But he did not admit the truth; that he could not, and would not, go to Rushing River Camp because he was jealous of Falconer.  To Nick it seemed impossible that any man, free to love, could be five minutes in Angela’s society without falling in love with her.

He had had his moments of hope, but with Falconer for a rival the handicap was too great.  Not that Nick meant to give up the fight; but if she went to Shasta it would be a knockdown blow.  John Falconer was high enough for a place in Mrs. May’s own world.  Nick despised jealousy as common and shameful, and had always scorned men who yielded to so mean a vice.  Now, however, they had his pity.  He knew what they suffered, and he could not go with Mrs. May, in Falconer’s car.

Nevertheless he beat down the desire to dissuade her from the trip.

“You oughtn’t to miss McCloud River,” he forced himself to say.

“I’ll see,” said Angela.  “It’s nice not to make up one’s mind, but just to enjoy the minute.”

“Are you enjoying the minute?”

“Yes.”

He was rewarded.  For this minute was his.  They were spinning along the coast road, between sea and meadow, with the salt breeze in their faces.  The red-gold earth rose and fell in gracious curves, like the breasts of a sleeping Indian girl, and now and then an azure inlet of the sea lit up a meadow as eyes light a face.  In the distance, mountains seemed to float like spirit guardians of hill-children; and desert dunes billowed through irrigated garden oases, like rivers of gold boiling up from magic mines.

Nick pointed out the two little mountains named after Louis the Bishop, and told Angela tales of the country, of the people, and of the little towns with Spanish names and faces, which gave her always that haunting impression of the Old World.  Some of the stories were her father’s stories, and she liked Hilliard the better for knowing them.