“No, poor thing, it’s worse off than we are, because it’s alone, and we’re together,” she said.  “We’ll go, and leave it in peace now we know what it is.”  And she kept beside Nick in the dark by holding daintily to his coat sleeve.

He found the steps of the gallery, and made her sit down on the lower one, rolling up for a cushion his coat, on which she had knelt as she looked at the vestments.  It began to seem odd that Billy had not come back, but it was difficult for Nick to regret the delay as much as he ought, for Angela’s sake, to have regretted it.

When she shivered and confessed that she was cold, Nick fetched her a priest’s coat from the gallery, a rare piece of brocade, embroidered perhaps by queen’s fingers, and smelling of incense.

“What can have happened to Billy?” Angela wondered.  “It’s the strangest thing that he doesn’t come back.  I begin to be frightened about him.”

Nick reassured her once more.  Things often seemed queer that were simple when explained, as doubtless this would be.  “I suppose you’d not like me to go——­” he began, only to be cut short before he could finish his sentence.

“No—­if you mean, would I like you to go and look.  While you’re here——­”

“Yes, Mrs. May?”

“Why, of course, nothing matters so much.  And I wish you wouldn’t stand where I can’t see you.  Do sit down on this step by me.”

So Nick sat down on the step, and her shoulder touched his arm.  They talked in low voices, he telling her things to “keep her mind off” the situation:  things about the Mission and other Missions.  Then the conversation turned to Nick’s ranch and the oil gusher which had given him fortune out of threatening ruin; and he described the queer little oil city which had grown up on his land.

“I should like to see it,” Angela said, when he had pictured Lucky Star City and ranch in a simple way, which was nevertheless curiously graphic.

He caught up her words eagerly.  “Would you let me take you there?” he begged.  “Mrs. Gaylor’d invite you to stay at her house.  You know I’ve told you about that, and how——­”

“Yes, I know.”  Angela could hardly have explained why, but somehow she did not want to hear Mrs. Gaylor talked of just then.  She was no longer indifferent to the idea of seeing Nick’s home, and the woman who had helped him to make it, yet she was not sure that she wished to go there.  Certainly she did not wish to visit Mrs. Gaylor.  But—­she would like to know whether the mistress of the Gaylor ranch was really so very beautiful.

“What we must think about now, is how to get out of this church,” she went on, laughing faintly in the dark.  “It seems as if we might have to stay here all the rest of our lives.”

“Are you hungry?” Nick inquired.

“A little.”

In his enraged disgust at not being able to procure a meal, Nick would gladly have killed and cooked the owl.