rush and forests of black pines; the tang of cold and the smell of
snow in the air; the lonely farmhouses folded among green hills; and the
primitive look of Truckee town with its little frame buildings called by
pretentious foreign names; Firenze Saloon; Roma Hotel.

Nobody else, however, seemed to have the half-sad, half-delicious sense of
remoteness from the world, at Tahoe, which Angela had. That month was very
gay, and the immense verandas of the tavern were flower-gardens of pretty
girls--those American "summer girls," of whom Angela had often heard. They
swam, and boated and fished, and, above all, flirted, for there were
always plenty of men; and in the evenings they danced in the ballroom of
the casino, built on the edge of the water.

Angela never tired of going from end to end of the lake in the steamboat
that set out from the tavern jetty in the morning and returned in the
afternoon. The captain, a great character, let her sit in a room behind
the pilot-box, where her luncheon was brought by an eager-eyed youth
working his way through college by serving as steward in the holidays. He
was in love with a girl at his university, equally poor and equally
plucky; but because she was earning dollars as a waitress at the tavern,
the boy thought Tahoe a place "where you couldn't help being happy."
Angela thought it a place where, more than most others, it might be
possible to find peace, though happiness was gone.

She no longer opened her diary. Never again, she told herself, would she
keep a record of her days. But, some time--years from now, maybe--when
she could read what she had written without a heartache, she would open
the unfinished volume where she had broken off a sentence in the great
redwood forest. She might be able to think of Nick Hilliard then without
longing for him; but that time seemed far, very far away.

* * * * *

One August evening Angela came back from an excursion to the top of Mount
Tallac. She was tired, and had made up her mind to dine in her own
sitting-room, then to go immediately to bed; but asking for her key she
was told that "a lady was waiting to see her; had been waiting nearly all
day."

"A lady!" she echoed. Could it be Mrs. Gaylor? Angela hoped not; for,
though she had not heard from Nick those things which Carmen had feared
and expected her to hear, she guessed something of Carmen's hate. The fact
that she had not been allowed to go back; t