from you, Nick! I
believe it's the first you ever paid me right out in so many words."

"Was it a compliment?" Nick asked doubtfully and boyishly. "Well, I'm real
glad I was smart enough to bring one off. I spoke out just what came into
my mind, and I'd have felt mighty bad if you'd been cross."

"I'm not cross!" she assured him. "I'd rather be a woman--for you--than an
angel. Angels are cold, far-off, impossible things that men can't grasp.
Besides, their wings would probably moult."

Nick laughed, a pleasant, soft laugh, half under his breath. "Say, I don't
picture angels with wings! The sort that flits into my mind when I'm tired
out after a right hard day and feel kind of lonesome for something
beautiful, I don't know hardly what--only something I've never had--that
sort of angel is a woman, too, and not cold, though far above me, of
course. She has starry eyes and moonlight hair--lots of it, hanging down
in waves that could almost drown her. But I guess, after all--as you
say--that sort's not my line. I'll never come in the light she makes with
her shining, and if I should by accident, she wouldn't go shooting any of
her starry glances my way."

Carmen was vexed again. "I didn't know you were so sentimental, Nick!"

He looked half ashamed.

"Well, I didn't know I was, either, till it popped out," he grinned. "But
I suppose 'most every man has sentimental spells. Maybe, even, he wouldn't
be worth his salt if he hadn't. Sometimes I think that way. But my spells
don't come on often. When they do, it's generally nights in spring--like
this, when special kinds of night-thoughts come flyin' along like
moths--thoughts about past and future. But lately, since that blessed
little oil town has been croppin' up like a bed of mushrooms round my big
gusher--or rather, the company's gusher, as it is now--I've had my mind on
that more than anything else, unless it's been my ditches. Gee! there's as
much romance about irrigation in this country, I guess, as there is about
angels which you can see only in dreams; for you see every day, when
you're wide awake, the miracle of your ditches. You just watch your desert
stretches or your meanest grazin' meadows turn into fairyland. I say, Mrs.
Gaylor, have you ever read a mighty fine book--old but good and fresh as
to-morrow's bread--called _The Arabian Nights?_"

"I don't know. I dare say I read some of it when I was a little girl,"
replied Carmen, wondering what Nick was leading