One evening, when July was beginning, Nick Hilliard sat on the veranda of
his plain little house, which he had grown to love. Swinging back and
forth in a big rocking-chair, he smoked a pipe and thought very hard. As
he thought and smoked, he looked dreamily at a young owl in a big cage;
the owl he had sent home from Paso Robles.
If he had been thinking about it, he could have seen, dark against the
pale fire of the desert sky, the source of his fortune; the great gusher
throwing up its black spout of oil, like tons upon tons of coal. For the
famous Lucky Star oil supply showed no sign yet of giving out, though it
had been playing like a huge geyser for many months; and already, since
its mysterious birth, many younger brothers had been born, small and
insignificant comparatively, but money-makers. If Nick's thought had not
drawn down a curtain in front of his eyes, he must have seen, across a
blue lake and a black desert created by a rain of oil, a forest of
derricks, like a scattered group of burnt fir-trees with low-hung bare
branches. But instead of these his mind's eye saw a new road, shaded by
walnuts and oaks, that marched in long straight lines between rough
pasture and irrigated land. He saw in the tree-shadows a yellow motor-car
drawn up by the side of the road, and in it a beautiful, pale girl,
hatless, with disordered golden hair and a torn white dress. He saw a man
with the girl, and heard her say that it would have been better to die
than let herself care for him.
"Yet she _did_ care for me," Nick told himself obstinately. "There's no
getting over that. She said, 'You mustn't think I don't care.'" And even
if she hadn't said it, there was that look in her eyes. Could he ever
forget the look, or cease to thrill at the memory? No; he knew that he
could not, till the hour of his death. "It was because I'm not of her
world, that she couldn't bear to let herself go, and love me as she was
beginning to love me, I know," he thought, as he had thought countless
times before, in the weeks since he had quietly let her go out of his
life. "I'm not what she's been brought up to call a gentleman," his mind
went on drearily preaching to him. "I suppose I can't realize the bigness
and deepness of the gulf between us, as she sees it. I've only my own
standards to judge by. Hers are mighty different. I knew there _was_ a
gulf, but I hoped love would bridge it. She thought no bridge could be
strong enough for her to walk on to me. I wonder if she thinks the same
yet, or if the feeling I have sometimes, that she's calling to me from far
off, means anything? I told her that day I'd feel her thinking of me
across the world. Well--what if she's thinking of me now?"
Nick had often debated this subject, and looked at it from every point of
view; for after the first blow over the heart, a dim, scarcely perceptible
light of hope had come creeping back to him. Knowing from her words, and
better still from her eyes, that Angela had cared a little, at least
enough to suffer, Nick had wondered whether he might not make himself more
acceptable to her than he had been.
He did not disparage himself with undue humility in asking this question.
He knew that he was a man, and that honour and strength and cleanness of
living counted for something in this world. But if he could become more
like the men she knew--in other words, a gentleman fit to mate with a
great lady--what then?
For Nick was aware that his manners were not polished. In what Mrs. May
would call "society," no doubt he would be guilty of a thousand mistakes,
a thousand awkwardnesses. If he did anything rightly it would be by
instinct--instinct implanted by generations of his father's well-born,
well-bred ancestors--rather than from knowledge of what was conventionally
the "proper thing." If Angela had let love win, perhaps she might often
have been humiliated by his ignorances and stupidities, Nick reminded
himself; and for him that would have been worse than death, even as for
her, according to her admission, it would have been worse than death to go
on caring for him. Perhaps she had been wise. Maybe he was "impossible."
But, if ever she suffered a moment's regret, now that they were parted,
and if he could yet find a way of happiness for both, better than cold
wisdom, was there no hope? It was of a way to reach her that he was
thinking to-night; and abruptly the big chair ceased to swing and creak.
"I'll go and see that chap they call the Dook!" Nick mumbled on a sudden
resolution, and knocked out the ashes from his pipe.
A minute later he was strolling through the hot purple twilight toward
Lucky Star City, one of the queerest little towns on earth. It had not,
however, the remotest conception that it was queer. On the contrary, it
thought itself a gay and pleasant place, singularly up-to-date, and
lacking nothing except water, which was now worth a good deal more than
the fortune-giving oil of which it had too much.
The rough, mostly unpainted, wooden houses, shops, and hotels composing
Lucky Star City were so near the great oil gusher which accounted for the
town's existence that the front rank of frame buildings was peppered all
over with a jetty spray. This disfigurement had come when the gusher was
at its highest, and its black, blowing spume had been borne by the wind
for long distances. The earth seemed to have gone into mourning and to be
spread with a pall almost as far as the boundary of the ranch which Nick
had retained for himself; yet there was a strong dividing-line. He had
kept some pasture land, for he loved cattle; but his great pleasure had
been in irrigation; and literally he had made the desert "blossom as a
rose." Even the smell was different when he turned his back upon his own
fragrant alfalfa fields, and drew in breaths laden with the fumes of crude
petroleum. But he was used to the scent of oil and hardly noticed it.
He skirted round the desert lake and steered clear of another lesser lake,
formed entirely of petroleum from the great gusher. By day its greasy
blackness glared in hideous contrast to the blue though brackish water;
but now night lent its ugliness a strange disguise. All the faint twilight
that remained glimmered on the gloss of its surface like phosphorus in
the palm of a negro's hand; and as Nick passed on toward the town, stars
shone out in its dark mirror. He could hear the thick splash of the gusher
that rose and fell, like the beating of a giant's heart, and from the
brightly lighted town sounds of laughter and fiddling came to him.
Lucky Star City had no suburbs. The whole place had grown up in less than
a year, and, in fact, such buildings as had existed for six months were
known as "old." There was but one street, though a few ambitious
landowners had run up houses in "gardens" at a short but haughty distance
from the "business part"; and at night the town was seen at its best. The
three two-storeyed, verandaed hotels--one painted white, another green,
the third and noisiest not painted at all--blazed with lights. The drug
store, the jewellery store (for there was a jewellery store, and a
prosperous one), the grocery store--combining a large trade in candy--the
post office, and the dry-goods store--where two extremes were made to meet
with a display of hats and shoes in the same window--were every one open
and crowded. Men in shirt-sleeves, and men in khaki, men of almost all
conditions and nations, sat or lounged on the hotel verandas making music
or listening to it, swapping stories and yelling with laughter. Away in
the distance at one end of the long street--which had no pavement but
yellow sand--there was a shooting gallery, and every second or two was
marked off with a shot, or a shout of applause or derision. At the other
end, equally far away from the populous centre of shops, was a variety
theatre, a mere shanty, run up in a day; and as Nick took his way toward
the green-painted hotel he could hear the shrill squalling of a woman's
untrained voice, shrieking out the latest comic song.
"Hello, Nick!" "How go things, High-pockets?" friendly voices saluted
Hilliard as he marched through the cigarette-strewn sand. And he had a
laughing word for each one. Everybody who was anybody had a nickname at
Lucky Star City, and Hilliard was rather pleased with "High-pockets"
--bestowed upon him because of his height and his long straight
legs. "The Dook" was the sobriquet of the person he had come to
see; and it was by this name that Nick inquired for him, gravely, of the
landlord.
The man addressed chuckled. "I guess he's gone over to Meek's to try and
borrow some cash off his dear country-man. I seen him strollin' down that
way. Hope Meek'll fork out. The Dook owes me two weeks' board, and I've
give him notice to pay up or quit. London hotels may hand out free meals
to the nobility and gentry for the sake o' the ad. But this ain't London.
Nope!"
"Is he nobility?" inquired Nick.
"Blamed if I know. Puts on airs enough. Ain't got much else to put on now,
I guess. No one never told me you and he was chums."
"No more we are. I never had a word with him; but I'm lookin' for a few,"
said Nick. "If he can make good, we may do some business together."
"Huh!" grunted the landlord of the emerald-painted hotel, which had
received its colour in honour and subtle advertisement of the owner's
name--Green. "I don't see you two swappin' canteens any, Nick, but it
ain't for me to bust into your game; and I guess if you sling him a roll
o' your good greenbacks, I'll contrive to switch some o' 'em off the line
into my pocket. That's to say, if you give him a job he can stick to his
bunk and his grub in my hotel."
Mr. Green was just about to round off his ultimatum with a spurt of
tobacco-juice aimed at a passing cat, when he checked himself hastily at
sight of a woman. What became of the tobacco-juice was a mystery or a
conjuring trick, but the cat's somewhat blunted sensibilities, and the
lady's--not yet blunted--were spared.
"Who's that?" Nick inquired in a low, respectful voice, when Green had
touched the place where his hat would have been if he had had it on, and
the young woman, bowing with stiff politeness, had gone by.
"What, don't you know?" the landlord of the Eureka Hotel replied with a
question. "But I forgot, you ain't shown up around here much since you
blow'd hack from the East. The fellers say Noo York's kinder got your
goat, and you're sheddin' your feathers in these lonesome wilds, pinin'
after the theayters and swell doin's in the Waldorf-Astoria. But I tell
'em 'nope, that ain't Nick Hilliard. He's true-blue to the Golden West."
"Right you are," said Nick. "All the same, I don't know who the lady is,
and I'm sure I never saw her here, though I have a sort of feelin' I
remember her face."
"Met in another world, mebbe?" Green chuckled. "She ain't no great looker,
though, more's the pity for our young sparks that could do with a noo
beauty at Lucky Star. She's no chicken, either; and her face is the kind
of face that to see once is to forget twice, accordin' to your friend the
Dook, who's great on what he calls epergrams, when he's feelin' well."
"Oh, is he?" Nick's hopeful expression lost some of its glow, for this
trait of the Dook's did not strike him as attractive. "He ain't my friend
yet. But you haven't told me who the lady is. Maybe her name will shake up
my recollection box, for I've seen her somewhere, sure."
"She's Miss Sara Wilkins, the new school-teacher," Green replied, glad to
impart information. "She was imported from the fur East while you was
away; called on in a hurry to take the place of Mrs. Pears, who died on
us, right in the midst of the last term, poor critter. She had no way with
youngsters, Mrs. Pears hadn't, though she came recommended as a treasure:
so p'raps it's just as well for us our treasure's laid up in heaven. We've
got a surprisin' lot of children in this city, for such a young one; but
our men are doin' that well they feel justified in sendin' fur their
families. We're gettin' a mighty nice society: some o' our ladies from the
East, as far off as Omaha; and 'twas the minister's wife stood out for
this Miss Wilkins, an old school-fellow o' hern. Pity she ain't handsome,
as we can't boast but two other unmarried gals in our set."
Nick reflected. Where had he seen that small-featured, conscientious
little face? He seemed to associate it with some agreeable and not very
distant episode; yet its intelligent insignificance was so overshadowed by
the pleasantness of the episode itself, that he now tried in vain to
identify it with a searchlight of recognition. "I give up," he said to
himself discontentedly. "Maybe it'll come to me later." And then,
suddenly, it did.
The new school-teacher at Lucky Star City was the little woman who had
arrived with the Native Daughters at the Santa Barbara hotel, and would
have been swamped by them had not Angela taken pity on her. No wonder it
had been an effort to label his impression, for no woman had a face worth
the name of face for Nick when Angela's was to be seen. But perhaps Miss
Wilkins had not had the same difficulty in disentangling him from among
her impressions of the past, for she had flashed upon him a glance, bright
with interest, before casting down her eyes decorously and passing on.
"Here comes the Dook now," remarked the landlord of the Eureka. "By the
look of him I guess his country-man wouldn't part with anything 'cept a
drink. If he keeps clear of the liquor belt, as a general thing, it's only
because his fee-nan-shel situation don't run to it. I'll introduce you."
A man approached, wearing a shambling air of discouragement, until he saw
that he was under observation; whereupon his muscles tightened, and he
pulled himself together, straightening his narrow shoulders and throwing
back his small head.
"Mr. Nickson Hilliard, this is Mr. Montagu Jerrold, _alias_ the Dook, a
blarsted Britisher," announced Green affably. "Dook, this is Mr. Nickson
Hilliard, who wants to meet you, the Lord knows why; late owner of Lucky
Star gusher and the whitest man and the biggest man we've got in this
section. His other name is High-pockets, as I guess you hev heard, and it
might be Full-pockets too, wuthout steerin' wide o' the mark."
Nick put out his hand to the newcomer who had a haughty beak of a nose,
little forehead, and less chin. Wretched bit of flotsam and jetsam on the
sands of life, one keen look into his self-satisfied light eyes was
enough to learn the secret of his failure; failure which, go where he
would, seek as he might, could never be turned into success. Nick's heart
pitied the man, while it shut involuntarily against him.
Montagu Jerrold crooked his elbow and lifted the brown strong hand of
High-pockets to a level with his own weak chin, before he deigned to shake
it. He did so then with an air, and a drawled "How d'y' do?" which was the
most English thing that Nick had ever met with off the stage.
"Little brute, I'd like to kick him if he wasn't such a duffer," was
Nick's reluctant thought, for he had wanted to be favourably impressed by
the Dook. If this were really anything like an English duke, give _him_ a
crossing-sweeper! But he must not be too hasty in his generalization. He
was unhappily sure that Mrs. May's position in her far-off world (world
for which he was deemed unworthy) associated her with dukes, earls,
barons, counts, and all sorts of titled anachronisms of every nation.
Repulsive as this draggled specimen appeared, it might know something
worth his, Nick Hilliard's, while to learn; and he was not going to give
up because of first impressions. He had not met Montagu Jerrold before,
but had heard of him often during the last three or four months since the
Englishman "blew into" Lucky Star City. He was a boaster as well as a
waster, no doubt; for according to himself, he knew "everybody at home,"
from the King down the whole gamut of the British peerage. Also he
"claimed" to be an Oxford man, and it was that which, in this emergency,
had focused Nick's attention upon him.
The landlord, aware that Nick had a "proposition" to make, excused himself
when he had brought off the introduction; and the two men were left more
or less alone at their end of the hotel veranda. Nevertheless, so
complicated was the nature of Nick's business that he wished for greater
privacy, and he suggested a stroll in the direction of the gusher.
"You're an Oxford graduate, aren't you?" he began.
"Ya-as, I went up to Oxford from Eton," drawled Jerrold with an accent
which Nick disliked, but was ready to believe in as well-bred, because few
Englishmen to the "manner born" had happened to come his way. "All the
elder sons of my family, since the days of Charles the Second, don't you
know, have gone in for the Army; and that's what I should have liked, but
my eldest brother has the money as well as the title, d'you see, and I'm
only third son. I----"
"Yes," said Nick curtly. "But you mustn't worry to tell me all your
private affairs unless you really want to. Because what I'm most
interested in is the Oxford part. I never went to college, nor to any
school for the matter of that, except a night one, but I've tried to make
up a bit with reading all I could. I suppose I don't know much about
books, compared with you----"
"Oh, I was never much of a grind," the other cut in hastily. "I went in
for other things. I was cox----".
"It's etiquette I'm thinking of," Nick confessed humbly. "You'd be born
knowin' a lot about that, I dare say, in your family. And then, being at
Oxford, too! I always notice college men have a different way from those
who haven't been to any university. It's hard to explain the difference,
but it's there."
"Oh, rather," agreed the Englishman. "You know our King himself will send
all his sons to Oxford and Cambridge. Nothin' like it, my dear fellow,
what? Our family----"
"Could you give lessons, sort of object-lessons, in what to do and what
not do in society?" inquired Nick, eager yet shy, not ashamed of his
motive in asking, but fearful by instinct that he was not getting hold of
the right man.
"Nothing easier," returned Montagu Jerrold, the prominent gooseberries,
which were his eyes, looking somewhat less thoroughly boiled. "I was
thinkin' of leavin' this beastly hole, don't you know. Nothin' in it for a
gentleman, what? But if you've somethin' to offer worth takin', why I
might stick it out for a bit, I dessay."
Nick longed to box the' creature's ears; but they were well-shaped and
might be the ears of a man born with etiquette flowing with his blue
blood, through azure veins. The shape of his nose wasn't bad, but those
eyes and that chin! They were, as Nick grimly expressed it to himself, the
_limit_. Nevertheless, he would persevere, and try a course of lessons
from the Dook.
They began to discuss terms, and Nick did not bargain. Mr. Jerrold was to
have an advance payment of twenty-five dollars, on account of fifty, for
ten "lessons"; and he was to come to Nick's house every evening to
"supper" at half-past seven, remaining until half-past nine. Hilliard was
to be watched through the meal and corrected if he did anything wrong with
his knife and fork, or his bread; and they were to have conversations and
discussions covering various imagined emergencies.
Details were arranged, much to the satisfaction of Montagu Jerrold, whose
real name was Herbert Higgins, and who had been a house decorator,
employed--and discharged--by a small London firm. Never had he been inside
an Oxford college: never had he seen the King--except on a post card. He
returned joyously to his hotel, where, as Mr. Green was lying in wait, he
had to part with most of his advance. And Nick tramped home torn in mind,
fearing instinctively that he was about to jump from the frying-pan of
ignorance into a fire of vulgarity at which Angela would shudder.
Every night for a week the Dook appeared promptly in time for Nick's
substantial supper, which, by the way, he advised his host to transform
into dinner. "You simply can't have 'supper' at half-past seven, my deah
fellow. It isn't _done!_ Dinner should be at eight, at earliest. Our
royalties prefer it at nine. If you have supper it is after the theatre or
opera, don't you know." But when Nick stolidly refused to be such an
"affected donkey" as to call his evening meal by another name to make it
sweeter, Mr. Jerrold did not scorn the meal because it lacked refinement.
On the seventh night, however, Hilliard gave his noble instructor notice.
"I'm real sorry," he remarked pleasantly, "but I can't help it. I'd rather
go on as I am, and pin myself to a prickly pear, than shine in society by
doing any of these monkey tricks you've been tryin' to put me on to. You
say they're 'the thing' and the newest dope and all that, and maybe
they're real nice for your sort, but I tell you they're not for mine! It
seems to me you know a wonderful lot of fool things that ain't so, and I
can't yoke up with 'em. What's more, I don't mean to. And now I see
they're the only cards you've got in your hand I don't want any more dealt
out to me--Hook up my little finger when I come to grips with a
coffee-cup! No, thank you! I _see_ myself doin' it or any other of the
pussy-catisms you've been tryin' to unload on me. And you drop your 'g's'
just as bad as I do. No, you'll have to switch off, doc; and after
to-night you can go your way and I'll go mine, for there's nothin' doin'
here for you except this little roll of bills. Good night, bud. That's all
the trumps in the game!"
But the bills--which were the trumps for Jerrold--amounted to fifty
dollars more than he had been promised for the whole course of lessons. So
he had not done badly after all. And leaving Lucky Star City, which had no
oil nor milk of human kindness for him, he drifted on somewhere else, as
he will continue to drift until he stumbles into an ignominious grave.
But Nick was angry and thwarted--angry with himself because he had been a
fool, and thwarted because he remained as before, handicapped by his own
ignorance. In spite of Jerrold's boasts, Nick's instinct had told him
after the first words exchanged that the man was not only a cad, but a
rank pretender. Still, in his desire for social knowledge, he had refused
at first to listen to the voice of instinct and had been punished for
obtuseness. The very thought of the little drawling outsider who had
delighted in his sobriquet of "the Dook" made Hilliard feel sick, and he
opened wide all the windows and doors when the contemptible creature went
out of the house. "Wanted to turn me into a dry-goods clerk, did he?" Nick
grumbled. And the episode was closed.
One afternoon, not many days after the expulsion of Montagu Jerrold, Nick
kept a long-made promise, by going to call on the wife of the Presbyterian
minister, the only professional purveyor of religion who had yet settled
in Lucky Star City. Mrs. Kenealy was out, but was coming back soon, and
Nick was urged by her small daughter to wait. This he consented to do, and
found the school-teacher also waiting in the pleasant little
"living-room."
The young man and woman were introduced by the child, who, then relieved
of responsibility, left them to each other's mercy, and flew to a friend
with whom she had been playing dolls on the back porch.
"I don't suppose you remember me," said Miss Sara Wilkins rather
wistfully. "But I remember you very well."
"So do I you," Nick was glad to reply with truth; and his heart warmed to
the wisp of a woman to whom Miss Dene had been catty and Mrs. May kind.
"It was at Santa Barbara."
"Why, you _do_ remember!" she exclaimed delightedly. "I never thought you
would. I always think there's nothing about me that any one _could_
recollect. Oh, would you mind telling me how that lovely lady is who was
so good to me? I often think about her. She was the most beautiful thing I
ever saw in my life."
Nick could have kissed her hands--little thin hands--kissed them even in
their gray lisle-thread gloves; Needless to say, however, he did nothing
of the sort. He answered quietly that it was now some time since he had
seen Mrs. May, but he supposed she was well, and still in California,
probably in San Francisco. She was planning to build a house near
Monterey. Though his voice and manner were particularly calm, his eyes
were as wistful, perhaps, as the school-teacher's smile had been. And just
because Sara Wilkins knew well what it was to be wistful and try to hide
it, perhaps she saw more clearly than a more attractive woman would.
"Something had happened," she said to herself. That splendid young couple,
about whom she had built up such a gorgeous romance, had been parted, and
this handsome fellow with the kind smile and heroic shoulders was unhappy,
far unhappier than Sara Wilkins had ever been, strange as that might
seem--he who had looked so fortunate! Sara wondered if the lovely lady
were unhappy, too, or if she had been cruel; and because Miss Wilkins
adored romance (having nothing more personally her own to adore), not
because she was naturally curious, the little woman positively ached to
know the story.
They had nearly half an hour together she and Nick before Mrs. Kenealy
returned, and in that time they had come close to the beginning of a
friendship, each being secretly in need of sympathy, and dimly detecting
the need in the other. Their liking for one another enchanted Mrs.
Kenealy, who was a born matchmaker. To be sure, Miss Sara Wilkins was not
pretty, and would never see twenty-nine again, but she was a good girl,
clever and affectionate, and would make Nick Hilliard the best of wives
if only he could be brought to see it. She sat between them, chattily
telling each one nice things about the other, and soon she suggested
bringing Miss Wilkins to visit Nick's ranch. School was off now, and the
poor dear had nothing to do but read and write letters home, whither it
cost far too much to return for only a few weeks. Nick said that he would
be delighted; and offered to send Miss Wilkins as many books as she liked
to her boarding house. Books were great friends of his, he admitted
somewhat shyly. She was welcome to borrow any she cared to have.
They saw a good deal of each other during the next fortnight, too much for
the school-teacher's peace of mind; for the oftener they met the more was
she convinced that Nick was in love, perhaps hopelessly in love, with
another woman as different from herself as a lily from a dusty sprig of
lavender. Then, one day when Nick had started to carry her some books and
they had met on the way, the two sat down and talked by the side of the
blue, brackish lake, sheltering from the sun behind a bank of yellow sand
that was like the high back of a queerly shaped throne. At a distance
passed Green, the landlord of the Eureka, out walking with his little
daughter, and in speaking of him and the odd folk who stopped at the green
hotel the "Dook" was mentioned. He had disappeared from Lucky Star City
some time before, but Miss Wilkins had met and disliked him.
"Horrid little pretentious toad!" she exclaimed sharply. "He was always
talking to every one he could get hold of about his family and his swell
friends and Oxford. But I don't believe any of his stories. He was just
worse than nobody at all; and East I've met real nice Englishmen who had
a _lovely_ accent, and wouldn't be found dead drawling like he did."
Nick laughed. "You're jolly right," he said; and then being in a humorous
as well as confidential mood, he told the story of himself and Montagu
Jerrold.
"Wasn't I a Johnny?" he asked at the end. "Served me right for trying to
make a silk purse of myself. Can't be done, I guess."
"But you are a silk purse!" Sara protested indignantly. "How can you talk
about yourself the way you do?"
"I'm a little down on my luck these days," he answered. "Did you ever read
about the moth who loved a star? I guess, when that moth got to thinking
of himself and his chances, he saw himself pretty well as he really was,
poor old chap. Fusty brown wings, too many legs, antennae the wrong shape,
and a clumsy way of usin' 'em. I've gone and made a moth of myself, Miss
Wilkins."
"Maybe the star doesn't think you a moth, or anyhow not a common moth,"
the little school-teacher tried to comfort him loyally, though her heart
ached as a lonely woman's heart must ache when the man she could have
loved, if she had dared, confides in her about the "other." She had known
quite well that there was another, but to have the confession come out in
words seemed to make her feel the grayness of life rather more intensely
than she had felt it before. Yet she rallied her forces and longed to
fight Nick Hilliard's battles and wave his banner in the face of the
enemy--if enemy there were.
"That's just what the star does think!" laughed Nick. "She thinks I'm
common."
Miss Wilkins stiffened with indignation. "I don't believe it--if she's a
_real_ star. And you wouldn't mistake an imitation one for real, would
you?"
"She's the brightest star in the heavens; as good as a whole
constellation."
"Then she can't think you common."
"Well, put in another way. She thinks me 'impossible'--impossible for her,
that is. She told me so. But I might have known it without telling. I
guess she thought I would know. I had the cheek to hope, though, that I
might polish myself up enough to pass muster in a crowd, even a crowd of
_her_ sort of people, and that she might change her mind about me."
"As if that disgusting little Montagu Jerrold could teach you anything!"
"I found he couldn't. Not anything she'd like me better for knowing."
"If she doesn't find you good enough as you are she isn't worth loving,"
insisted the school-teacher. "Oh, I know I'm not the same kind of woman
she is! I'm only a little 'provincial,' as I expect she'd call me in her
own mind, but--but I can tell a _man_ when I see him."
"Thank you a whole lot for sticking up for me," said Nick, boyishly. "But
how do you know what kind of a woman my star is?"
Miss Wilkins blushed and was silent. She did not look pretty when she
blushed, like Angela, but Nick thought she had one of the nicest little
faces in the world.
"I expect I've gone and given myself away," he said. "Well, I don't care,
for you're so good and sympathetic. You've seen my star, and you can judge
just what kind of a blame fool I was to hope she could ever really care
for a rough fellow like me--care enough to be yoked up with me for life."
"Are you sure she didn't care?" asked the school-teacher.
If he had "given himself away" he did not intend to give away Angela. "I
told you she said I was impossible," he answered discreetly. "Well, thank
you again for listenin' to my whinings. It's done me a lot of good. Now
I've talked enough and too much about myself. Let's talk about you."
"There's nothing interesting to say about me," Miss Wilkins defended
herself, with the faintest sigh that only a man who loved her would have
heard. "We won't talk about you any more, though, if you don't want to.
That book of Mr. Muir's you sent me is beautiful. I've been wishing to
read it for years."
So they fell to discussing _The National Parks of America_; but Sara's
heart was not in the discussion, much as she admired the book. She was
thinking about Nick and Angela.
"It doesn't seem," she told herself, "that a woman who could be so kind to
another woman as she was to me, when she didn't even know me, could be
cruel to a man she _did_ know and like, even if she didn't love him. And
could a woman he loved not love him back again?"
Miss Wilkins had resigned herself long ago, or thought she had, to going
through life without any intimate personal interests of her own, and when
her heart ached hardest that night in her mean little boarding-house
bedroom, it was going out most warmly toward Nick, and yearning for the
happiness of making him happy.
"If I could only do something!" she said to her mossy-smelling pillow.
"And I owe _her_ a good turn too, although maybe she doesn't deserve it. I
wonder what I _could_ do?"