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 nobody 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 associated 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 noblest 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.”