"But it isn't about myself I want to talk," protested the stranger. "I must tell you my name, Mrs. May. Of course, you've forgotten it. It's Miss Wilkins--Sara Wilkins."

She didn't want to talk about herself! That was puzzling and didn't fit in with Angela's deductions. However, she made no comment, and talking of her day on Mount Tallac, escorted Miss Wilkins to a pretty sitting-room, which in her absence had been supplied with fresh flowers.

"Shall we talk first?" Angela asked. "Or would you like to rest and bathe----"

"If you're not too tired yourself to listen to me, I'd rather talk now,"

Sara answered with a kind of suppressed desperation. "But you do look tired. You're thinner and paler than at Santa Barbara! Yet I've been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g my courage up to this for so long I can hardly bear to wait."

"If I was tired I've forgotten it now," said Angela. "And I'm as eager to begin as you can be. But you mustn't feel that it needs courage to speak out, whatever you have to say. And if there's any way for me to make it easier for you, I should be so glad if you could give me just the slightest hint. Shall we both sit down on this sofa together?"

"You sit there," replied Sara. "I don't _want_ to be comfortable. I couldn't lean back. I'm all on edge."

"Oh, but you mustn't be 'on edge'!"

"I don't tell you that to get sympathy, Mrs. May," said the school-teacher, "but only because I'd like you to understand before I begin that I haven't come just to be 'cheeky' and bold. I came because I felt I must--on somebody's account, if not yours. For myself, I didn't want to force myself on you. I didn't want it one bit! And now I'm here, if I could do what I feel most like doing, I'd run away as fast as ever I could go, without saying one more word."

"You almost frighten me," said Angela, her eyes dark and serious. "Have I done something dreadful that--that I ought to be warned not to do again, and you have come to tell me because you think I was once a little kind to you? Not that I was really kind--for it was nothing at all that I did."

Miss Wilkins, sitting stiff and upright on the smallest, straightest, least luxurious chair in the pretty room, was silent for an instant, as if collecting all her forces. "No," she answered at last. "It wouldn't be fair to say exactly that. And yet you _have_ done something dreadful. Oh, my goodness, this is even harder to get out than--than I supposed it would be, for, of course, you'll think it's not my business anyhow. And isn't or wouldn't be if--if----"

"If--what?" Angela prompted her gently.

Sara Wilkins swallowed a lump in her throat and pressed her lips together.

They were dry and pale. "Well," she broke out, "I'll have to tell you the truth and not care for my own feelings. They don't matter really. It wouldn't be my business if I didn't love him myself, dearly--oh, but not selfishly! And he doesn't dream of it. He never will. And he never thinks about me except to pity me a little and do kind things because I'm alone in the world. And that's all I want of him. It is, truly, though I can't explain very well. I just want him to be happy, and to have made him so.

Because _somebody_ had to act if anything was to be done. And there was n.o.body but me."

"Him!" Angela repeated in a whisper. Yet the name was in her mind now, as always it was in her heart.

"Mr. Hilliard, of course. You see"--desperately--"I'm school-teacher at Lucky Star City, close to his place. All the land there and the big gusher were his. When he came back in June I was at Lucky Star, and we were introduced. He remembered my face dimly, more I guess because he couldn't forget even the least thing a.s.sociated with you than for any other reason.

Since then we've got to be friends."

Angela did not speak, even when Sara Wilkins made a slight hesitating pause. Her heart was beating too fast and thickly for words to come, and, besides, there seemed to be nothing to say yet, until she had heard more.

"Don't think," Sara went on, gathering courage, "that he confided in me in any ordinary way. I just couldn't bear you should do him that injustice.

If you did I should have done harm instead of good by coming all this way to see you. But the very first day I met him at Lucky Star I asked about you, and I--_saw_; though he only said he believed you were in San Francisco--that he was heart-broken about you. Even at Santa Barbara I couldn't help making up a romance round you both--you so beautiful and somehow like a great lady, though you didn't put on any airs at all; he so handsome and splendid, like a hero in some book of the West. It was weeks before we mentioned you again--he and I--though I saw a lot of him at Lucky Star. He was kind, and it was holidays, so I hadn't much to do except read books he lent me."

Still Angela said nothing, though it was evident that Miss Wilkins would have been thankful at this stage for some leading question which might help her over a difficult place. Angela could not now give the help she had once offered. Rather was she in need of it herself. She sat waiting, her eyes disconcertingly fixed upon the other woman's flushed face. But that was because she could not bring herself to look away from it.

"Before we spoke of you again, what do you think he'd been doing?" the school-teacher went on, almost fiercely.

"Oh, I can hardly tell you, it's so sad! If you're the sweet woman that in spite of everything I think you _are_, you'll be sorry all the way through to your heart. He--he hired a wretched humbug of a man who pretended to be an English swell to teach him _manners_, so that he could be a little worthier of you. He, _Nick Hilliard_, the n.o.blest gentleman that ever drew breath, to stoop to learning from a little thing who called itself Montagu Jerrold. He did it because of what _you_ said to him."

"Oh!" cried Angela, her cheeks scarlet. "I said nothing--nothing which could make him feel that I didn't think him a gentleman. I----"

"That's what I told him," Sara broke in. "I knew his reason for employing Jerrold, because he made up a sort of allegory about a moth loving a star and trying to fly up to heaven and be near her, or something like that. I said that a _real_ star couldn't be stupid enough to think him a moth, or, anyway, not a common one. And he said, 'That's just what she does think me, _common_.' I knew he meant you, though he didn't speak your name then. And I thought to myself, 'She didn't look like a silly doll stuffed with sawdust,' I did you the justice to believe that a great lady, experienced in the world, would know and appreciate a _man_. I'm just n.o.body at all, Mrs. May; but even I'm clever enough for that. I'm sure as fate, if I were acquainted with all the best kings and princes there are in the world, I couldn't find a better gentleman than Nick Hilliard. Yet according to him you didn't have the eyes to see what he was worth. You not only turned him down, but turned him down saying he was too common for you."

Angela could stand no more. It was as if the fierce little woman in dusty blue serge had struck her in the face. She sprang up, very white, her eyes blazing. "It is not true," she said in a low voice. "He couldn't have told you I said that."

"He told me you said just the same thing: that he was 'impossible.' That was the word--a cruel, cruel word."

She was up too, the fiery little school-teacher, and they faced each other--the tall girl, white as lily grown in a king's garden, and the little snub-nosed, freckled country schoolma'am.

"Do you mean when I used the word 'impossible,'" asked Angela, "that he thought I meant it in _such_ a way--meant to tell him that he was an impossible person?"

"Yes, I do mean just that."

"You're _sure_ of what you say?"

"Dreadfully sure. When I'd got that much out of him--somehow. I hardly know how--I felt wounded and sore, as I knew he was feeling, and, would feel all the rest of his life. Oh, I'd have given mine for him! I would then, and I would now, to make him happy. That's why I came up here--to find out whether, after all, there could be any misunderstanding between you that could be righted. He doesn't know I've come. He thinks I'm staying with a friend in San Francisco. I don't want him to know, ever. I should die of shame. I wish I could talk in some wise, clever way to you, and get you to see what a mistake you've made. He loves you so, Mrs. May!"

Then a thing happened which was the last that Sara Wilkins had expected.

With a stifled cry Angela turned away, and, covering her face with both hands, sobbed as if her heart would break.

The little school-teacher trembled all over. She had come here--giving her time and money--far more than she could afford--and her nerve-tissue, in Nick Hilliard's cause; and all in the hope of making his "star" see the error of her ways. But when the cruel star broke down and cried uncontrollably, in anguish of soul, the hardness and anger which Nick's champion had cherished melted into pity.

"I do hope you'll forgive me," she stammered. "I--I didn't mean to make you suffer like this. I'm so afraid I've done everything all wrong! But I let my feelings carry me away. I thought if you loved him a little after all, maybe----"

"Loved him! I love him so much that it's killing me!" Angela broke out through her tears. "I can't sleep at night, for thinking of him, longing for him, and telling myself it's all over--all the joy of waking up to a new day and knowing I shall see him. Ah, night is terrible! I pray for peace, and just as I begin to hope--to be a little calmer, at least by day, out in the sunshine looking at the white mountains, you, a stranger, come and tell me that I _don't love him!_"

"I wouldn't have dared if I didn't love him myself," Sara retorted, choking on the words. "You see--I _know_. But if you care for him like this, if you're so unhappy without him, why did you send him away broken-hearted?"

Angela flung her hands up, then dropped them hopelessly. With no attempt to hide her tear-blurred face she answered: "I sent him away because I am married. I said 'It is impossible'; not--what he seems to think I said."

"Oh, how sad!" The little school-teacher was confronting real tragedy for the first time in her gray, conscientious existence. "How sorry I am.

Forgive me! But--you know, it isn't I who matter."

"No," Angela echoed. "It isn't you."

"You didn't tell him? You gave him no idea?"

"I hadn't a chance. There'd been an evening, a little while before, when I'd meant to tell if--if anything happened. But--we were interrupted."

"He thinks you're a young widow."

"Yes. It's only in the sight of the world that I have a husband--that I _ever_ had one. When I came to America I left the man for good, and took another name."

"'Mrs. May' isn't your real name?"

"No. I'll tell you if you like----"

"You needn't. But you ought to tell _him_. That, and everything. I don't mean _confess_, or anything like that. Probably you thought, till you fell in love with him, that there was no reason why you should give him your secrets. What I mean is--oh, the difference it would make to Mr.

Hilliard, knowing that you sent him away, not because you looked down on him as common and impossible, but because you had no _right_ to care!"

Angela stared at the earnest little face as if she were dazed, bewildered in a dark place, and groping for light.

"I had no idea he misunderstood me so," she said slowly. "If I'd guessed at the time, I couldn't have resisted telling him how much I loved him. I couldn't have let him go, so wounded. But now, since no happiness can ever come for us together, and perhaps by this time he is getting over his first suffering, wouldn't it be better just to leave the veil of silence down between us? I don't want to hurt him all his life long. It must make it easier for him to forget, if he believes me a 'doll stuffed with sawdust,' or a sn.o.b. He can't go on for long loving a poor thing like that. And so he will be cured. Oh, though I long to send him a message--I mustn't. I mustn't be tempted! Let him think badly of me. It's the best and kindest thing."

"No," said Sara Wilkins, "that is not the right way; not for _him_. It might be with a vain man. But he doesn't get over it. He doesn't stop loving you. Only the pain is worse because he thinks you scorned him. Mrs.

May, I implore you to write him a letter. I can't take a message, because he mustn't know I came to see you. It would spoil it all for him, I think.