He had had his moments of hope, but with Falconer for a rival the handicap was too great. Not that Nick meant to give up the fight; but if she went to Shasta it would be a knockdown blow. John Falconer was high enough for a place in Mrs. May's own world. Nick despised jealousy as common and shameful, and had always scorned men who yielded to so mean a vice. Now, however, they had his pity. He knew what they suffered, and he could not go with Mrs. May, in Falconer's car.
Nevertheless he beat down the desire to dissuade her from the trip.
"You oughtn't to miss McCloud River," he forced himself to say.
"I'll see," said Angela. "It's nice not to make up one's mind, but just to enjoy the minute."
He was rewarded. For this minute was his. They were spinning along the coast road, between sea and meadow, with the salt breeze in their faces. The red-gold earth rose and fell in gracious curves, like the breasts of a sleeping Indian girl, and now and then an azure inlet of the sea lit up a meadow as eyes light a face. In the distance, mountains seemed to float like spirit guardians of hill-children; and desert dunes billowed through irrigated garden oases, like rivers of gold boiling up from magic mines.
Nick pointed out the two little mountains named after Louis the Bishop, and told Angela tales of the country, of the people, and of the little towns with Spanish names and faces, which gave her always that haunting impression of the Old World. Some of the stories were her father's stories, and she liked Hilliard the better for knowing them.
They had both forgotten Miss Sara Wilkins, who had "stopped off" at Santa Barbara because all her life she had wanted to see the place. But just at that moment, on her way to Bakersfield, she happened to be thinking of them both.
At last the car plunged into a maze of folding hills, like giant dunes. The motor road was woven in twisted strands while the railway overhead strode across the gaps between height and height, on a vast trestle that might have been built for an army of Martians. Rock-crested hills rose gray in the sun above the soft night of oak forests; and as the road ascended, its ribbons were looped from mountain to mountain like the thrown lasso of a cowboy.