"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.