“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 snob.  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.”