LITMIR.BIZ

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the brilliance of the brook-brown eyes which made Nick a handsome man, and not merely a "good-looking fellow." It was because of his eyes that women turned in the street for another glance when he went into Bakersfield or Fresno; but Nick never knew that they turned. He liked pretty girls, and enjoyed their society, but was too busy to seek it, and had had little of it in his life. It did not occur to him that he had qualities to attract women. Indeed, he wasted few thoughts upon himself as an individual; not enough, perhaps; for he gave his whole attention to his work. Work was what he liked best, even without the ultimate success it brought, but lately he had begun to long for a change. He had a strong wish to go East, and a reason for the wish.

      Carmen held out both hands, and enjoyed seeing how white they looked in Nick's sunburned, slightly freckled ones. He shook hers, frankly, warmly, and apologized for his "rig," which was certainly far from conventional. "I'm ashamed of myself for blowin' in on you this way," he said, "especially as you're so mighty fine. I hope you'll excuse me, for you know I pull out to-night, and Jim Beach is bringin' the buggy along here for me, with my grip in it. If I'd piked back home afterward, my visit with you'd have been a cut game."

      "Ah, I'm glad you arranged not to go back," said Carmen. "I want you to stay with me as long as you can. I like you in those clothes." She smiled at him as if she would like him in anything; but Nick was thinking about Jim Beach, wondering if the boy would have trouble with the flea-bitten gray, which he himself had newly broken to harness.

      "All the same," Carmen went on, "though I like them, you haven't got much vanity if you mean to wear those things to travel East, and land in New York."

      "Why, what's the matter with 'em, Mrs. Gaylor?" Nick asked. He spoke carelessly, in the matter of accent as well as of his feeling about the clothes. He cut off his words in a slipshod way, as if he had never had time to think much about the value or beauty of the English language. Still, though his speech was not that of a cultivated man, it did not grate on the ear. His voice was singularly pleasant, even sweet, with something of boyish gaiety in it.

      "The things are all right, Nick, and you're all right in them. You needn't worry," said Carmen. "Only—well, I don't believe there'll be anything else like them—or like you either—in New York."

      Nick looked himself over indifferently. He wore a "soft" white shirt, with a low collar turned over a black scarf tied anyhow. There was a leather belt round his waist, which obviated the need of a waistcoat or suspenders. His short coat and trousers were of navy blue serge. Everything he had on was neat and of good material, but Carmen smiled when she thought of this tall, belted figure, hatted with a gray sombrero on the back of its head, arriving at one of the best hotels in New York. Nick was pretty sure to go to one of the best hotels. He wanted to see life, no doubt, and get his money's worth. Her smile was as tender as Carmen's smile could be, however, and she was pleased that he was not "dressing up" to make an impression on pretty women in the East.

      "I don't care what anybody thinks about me in New York," said he. "As long as you excuse me for not having on my Sunday-go-to-meeting rags to dine with you, I don't mind the rest."

      "I thought you were never coming," she said, changing the subject.

      "So did I, by George! I thought the fellow'd never go."

      "Was it a deputation to say good-bye?"

      "Lord, no, Mrs. Gaylor! It was a chap you don't know, I guess. I only ran up against him lately, since I sold my gusher to the United Oil Company. He's their lawyer—and does some work for the railroad too. Smart sort of man he seems to be, though kind of stiff when you first know him: between forty and forty-five, maybe: name's Henry Morehouse, a brother of a bank manager in San Francisco."

      "James Morehouse the banker is a very rich, important man," said Carmen, somewhat impressed by the idea of Nick's new friend who had stayed too long. "I've never met his family myself. You know how close I was kept till a year ago. But I've heard of them. They're in with the Falconer set and that lot, so it shows they're smart. What does Henry Morehouse want, making up to you, Nick?"

      "It was oil business brought us together and he seemed to take a sort of likin' to me. We care about some o' the same things—books and that. Now he's going East—maybe on more oil business. Anyhow, he proposes we share a stateroom on the Limited, and he's been recommendin' his hotel in New York. I was kind of plannin' to be a swell, and hang out at the Waldorf-Astoria, to see the nobs at home. But his place sounds nice, and I like bein' with him pretty well. He's lit up with bright ideas and maybe he'll pass on some to me. His business won't keep him long, he thinks; and he's promised his brother James to look after a lady who's landing from Europe about the time we're due in New York. He'll meet her ship; and if she doesn't want to stay East any length of time, he'll bring her back to California. She means to settle out here."

      Carmen's face hardened into anxious lines, though she kept up a smile of interest. She looked older than she had looked when she held out her hands to Nick. She had been about twenty-six then. Now she was over thirty.

      "Is the lady young or old?" she asked.

      "I don't know anything about her," Nick answered with a ring of truthfulness in his voice which Carmen's keen ears accepted. "All I can tell you is, that she's a Mrs. May, a relation or friend of Franklin Merriam the big California millionaire who died East about ten years ago—about the time I was first cowpunching on your ranch."

      "Oh, the Franklin Merriam who made such stacks of money irrigating desert land he owned somewhere in the southern part of the State!" Carmen sighed with relief. "I've heard of him of course. He must have been middle-aged when he died, so probably this woman's old or oldish."

      "I suppose so," Nick readily agreed. "Great king, isn't it mighty sweet here to-night? It looks like heaven, I guess, and you're like—like——"

      "If this is heaven, am I an angel? Do I seem like that to you?"

      "Well, no—not exactly my idea of an angel, somehow: though I don't know," he reflected aloud. "You're sure handsome enough—for anything, Mrs. Gaylor. But I've always thought of angels lily white, with moonlight hair and starry eyes."

      "You're quite poetical!" retorted Carmen, piqued. "But other men have told me my eyes are stars."

      He looked straight into them, and at the hot pomegranate colour which blazed up in her olive cheeks, like a reflection of the sunset. And Carmen looked back at him with her big, splendid eyes.

      It was a man's look he gave her, a man's look at a woman; but not a man's look at the woman he wants.

      "No," he answered. "They're not stars. They're more like the sun at noon in midsummer, when so many flowers are pourin' out perfume you can hardly keep your senses."

      Carmen was no longer hurt. "That's the best compliment I ever had, and I've had a good many," she laughed. "Besides—coming 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,

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