Angela would gladly have turned from so lurid an occupation to any other pursuit; but Mr. Sealman looked as if his health were more fragile than that of the car. When he clawed obscurely at the crystallized sugar ornaments under the bright bonnet of the fainting Model, his air looked so dejected, his eyes so hollow, and his smile so wan that Angela's fury melted into pity. Passionate resolves to shed him and his blue abomination died within her as she watched his struggles. His whole future depended, he said, on the Model. If Mrs. May should throw him over and hire another car, the news would fly like lightning from garage to garage of Los Angeles; indeed, from end to end of California. He would be ruined. His mother, who had been forbidden excitement, would, without doubt, die of heart failure. The heart of Angela failed also, again and yet again. She began to see that Mr. Sealman had cast himself for the part of Old Man of the Sea, in a travel drama of which she was heroine. She felt alone in the world. "It will probably end in my having to buy the little blue brute and burn it," she thought. "But even then the codfish will probably insist on being my butler." These gloomy forebodings shadowed her mind one morning when the Model broke down about half a mile from fantastic little Venice, the Coney Island of South California. In a rage she got out and walked, past a kaleidoscopic pattern of tiny bazaars, shooting-galleries, paper icebergs, and cardboard mountains. She threaded her way through a good-natured crowd of tall, tanned young Americans, pretty girls with wonderful erections of golden hair, dark-faced Mexicans, yellow-faced Japanese, a few Hindus and negroes. Then, by the pier, she saw an old Spanish galleon disguised as a restaurant, and drifted in to lunch on fried sand-dabs attractively advertised in big black letters. How old, how Spanish, and how galleon the craft might really be, none could tell--or would. But the sand-dabs were delicious; and from the queer window near her table--a window cut in the ship's side--she could see the Pacific, blue in distance, green where it tossed white foam-blossoms on a beach of gold. "Breakdowns would be fun if I'd some one to laugh at them with me," she thought; and her mind conjured up the image of Nick Hilliard, seating him opposite her at the little table.