“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.”