d if he couldn't, it had
better fall!

Angela stood with her back to her victim, and the rosy light of sunrise
turned a small visible slip of white skin to pearl. A ring or two of
bright hair, moist from her bath, curled out from the turned-up mass of
gold, and hovered like little glittering bees just over the top buttons of
Mrs. May's collar, which Nick must now attack. What if some of that shiny
hair was twisted around the buttons? Good heavens! On closer inspection it
was!

The man's heart, which was beating fast, seemed suddenly to turn to
water--wild, rushing water, like that of the river below the fall.

"Can you do it?" asked Angela, anxiously.

"I sure will," answered Nick, with a hundred per cent, more confidence
than he felt. A confidence somewhat increased, however, by last evening's
success. "Do I begin at the neck or the waist?" he inquired in his most
matter-of-fact voice, as if he were about to cord a box, or nail up a
crate of oranges.

"At the neck," Angela instructed him.

The stricken young man had a curious sensation, as if his hands were
swelling to an immense size. He seemed to have as much control of his
fingers as though he wore a pair of boxing gloves.

He took hold gingerly of the delicately embroidered collar, a thumb and
finger on either side. "I guess it won't meet," he ventured, tentatively.

"Oh, yes, it will. Just pull it together firmly."

Nick pulled with resolution.

"Ugh! You're choking me!" she gurgled.

All that water which once had been his heart trickled vaguely and icily
through the wrong veins, upsetting his whole system.

"Forgive me this time!" he implored. "It's going to be right, just as soon
as--as--I find the buttonholes."

"There aren't any. They're loops."

"Oh, those tiny little stick-up things, like loosened threads?"

"Yes. You'll see it's _quite_ easy, after the first."

Oh, was it indeed? Nick suppressed a groan, not at his task, but at his
own oxlike awkwardness (so he anathematized it) that made a torture of a
delicious privilege. Evidently it was a much harder thing to lasso one of
these little pearl atrocities with its alleged "loop" than to rope a
vicious steer. And there were those tangling threads of gold. If he should
hurt her!

The ex-cowboy almost prayed, as, with the caution of a man treading upon
knife-blades on the edge of a precipice, he unwound the two little curls
from the top button of the collar. And perhaps his unconscious app