en--friends in a former incarnation,
wouldn't it?" But this was a question to leave unanswered, and she went on
quickly to describe what she saw behind the "stage curtain" of the Bridal
Veil. "A white witch falling----"

"Yes, from the saddle of a black horse----"

"A winged horse, like those the Valkyries ride. Oh, now the witch has
turned her face to me, as she falls. She's putting me under a spell. I
feel I shall never escape."

"I hope you never will," said Nick. "So we _did_ see the same thing in the
Cascade! I found the falling witch when I was here before; but I came
under the spell with you."

He watched her face fearfully, as he ventured this, never having dared as
much before; and seeing that she turned away, he drew her attention to El
Capitan, grandest of the near mountains. Nick had been reading _The Cid_,
trying to "worry through it in the old Spanish," he explained; and the
idea had come into his head that the mountain might have been named by
some Spaniard for "El Gran Capitan." "You see, it's too big and important
for an everyday Captain. But it's just right for El Gran Capitan: don't
you think so?"

Angela did think so, as he suggested it, though she remembered next to
nothing about _The Cid_. But Nick's knowledge of history, which had
amazed her once, pleased without surprising her now. She began to take his
knowledge of most things for granted. Here in the Yosemite Valley he could
teach and show her much that she might have missed but for him, and his
similes showed habits of thought with which a few weeks ago she would not
have credited the ex-cowboy. He made the mountains take shape for her as
gods and heroes of Indian legends; he told her of the Three Graces, and
the Three Brothers, grim as gray monks, who threw glances over their round
shoulders at the Graces; and there was no drama or tragedy of the valley
that he did not know from its first act to the last.

In the afternoon the stage rushed them past a charming camp in the woods,
to the Sentinel Hotel, at the foot of the Yosemite Falls. Angela was given
a room opening on to a veranda, and waiting for Nick to bring her some
word from Kate, by telephone, she stood looking up at the immeasurable
height of the cataract, which loomed white across a brown sweep of
trout-haunted river. "It's like a perpendicular road of marble going up to
heaven," she thought; and as she gazed, down that precipice of snow came
tumbling a white shape as of a gia