"
"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.
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