"I know. Keep out of your way. And I've promised. But I don't realize that I've made a mistake, Mrs. May. There's no use sayin' I do; for, in spite of all, if 'twas to do over again, I would. I wouldn't change anything."
"Then you shouldn't boast of it!" exclaimed Angela. "Confession may be good for the soul of the confessor, but it can be embarrassing for the one confessed to. You oughtn't to have told me why you came. The only thing to save the situation would have been to let me think it was an accident."
"You wouldn't have thought so long—unless I lied. Ought I to have lied?"
She was rather thankful that the waiter came just then with the menu, and saved her from answering. She ordered her dinner, and the smiling negro turned to Nick.
"I don't think I want——" he began. But Angela sternly caught his eye, mutely commanding him to eat. When he had chosen several dishes at random, and the waiter had gone, she reproached him again. "What would people think if you went away in the midst of dinner? There's a man opposite staring at us now! You're not as tactful as you were the night of the burglar. Then, you did just the right thing, cleverly and bravely. For that I can forgive you a good deal—but not everything. Now you make one blunder after another."
"That night in New York you wanted me. This time you don't. I guess that's what makes the difference in the quality of my gray matter," said Nick. "I feel riddled with bullets, and they've hit me right where I live. I—I suppose you'll never forgive me, will you? If you only half guessed how little I meant to butt in, or be rude, or annoy you, maybe you could, though."
"Maybe I can—by and by; for the sake of your kindness in the past." Angela relented. "But not even for that quite yet. And not ever, if you look so stricken that you make people stare."
"I am stricken," Nick confessed.
"You deserve to be." She crushed him deeper into the mire. Whereupon the soup arrived, and they began to eat, and talk politely. Nick had never known before that a man could be wildly happy and desperately miserable at the same time, but now he knew. And he would not have changed places with any other man in the world. "I'm under a spell," he said to himself, "and I wouldn't get out of it if I could."
At the same moment Angela conjectured that there must be something strange about the air she was breathing in this New World. "It makes one want to act queerly," she thought. "I'm sure I should have acted quite differently about this whole affair in Europe. It's so easy to feel conventional in places where you've always lived, and where you know everybody. Or is it only because this man's so different from any one else? I thought I was beginning to understand his nature, but now I see I don't. The thing is, I was too nice to him. I oughtn't to have asked him to lunch and dine in New Orleans. That began the mischief. And it was my fault more than his."