nd not _ever_, if you
look so stricken that you make people stare."

"I _am_ stricken," Nick confessed.

"You deserve to be." She crushed him deeper into the mire. Whereupon the
soup arrived, and they began to eat, and talk politely. Nick had never
known before that a man could be wildly happy and desperately miserable at
the same time, but now he knew. And he would not have changed places with
any other man in the world. "I'm under a spell," he said to himself, "and
I wouldn't get out of it if I could."

At the same moment Angela conjectured that there must be something strange
about the air she was breathing in this New World. "It makes one want to
act queerly," she thought. "I'm sure I should have acted quite differently
about this whole affair in Europe. It's so easy to feel conventional in
places where you've always lived, and where you know everybody. Or is it
only because this man's so different from any one else? I thought I was
beginning to understand his nature, but now I see I don't. The thing is, I
was _too_ nice to him. I oughtn't to have asked him to lunch and dine in
New Orleans. That began the mischief. And it was my fault more than his."

But then, according to the man's own confession, the mischief had begun
in New York. "I wish I could make myself enjoy snubbing the extraordinary
creature," she went on, as she ate her dinner, throwing an occasional
sentence concerning the scenery, or, as a last resort, the weather, to her
chastened companion. "But it's difficult to snub a person who's saved your
life and lent you money and found your gold bag. That's why he oughtn't to
have put me in this position--because I owe him gratitude. It's really
horrid." And she began to feel sincerely that the New Type had conducted
itself unworthily.

She gave Nick a cool bow when she was ready to go, and left him plunged in
gloom, but stubbornly unrepentant. "It's a tough proposition I'm up
against," he thought, "but a man's as good as his nerve. And I'll fight
till the next spring rains sooner than let her slip away out of my life."

It was deep blue dusk when Angela went back to her stateroom, too dark to
look out of the window; yet she had lost interest in the book which she
had found absorbing earlier in the day. It seemed irrelevant somehow; and
though there was no reason why they should do so, her own affairs appeared
more insistently exciting than before. "It's the call of the West
already," she answered her o