"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."