The spell was broken for Angela. She knew now, if she had not known before, that it was Nick Hilliard who lit the world for her with the light never seen on land or sea, where love is not. Some quality was gone from the sunshine, and the glory of the golden poppies had withered.

Back in San Francisco, living in the rooms which he had helped to make beautiful with daily gifts of flowers, she realized how completely Nick had meant for her the spirit of the West. It was because he had been with her that, from morning till night, she had thrilled with the joy of life and excited anticipation of each new day which had never failed or let her tire.

Every moment she missed him and wanted him, and would have given anything to call him back to her; but she had no right to call, for what had she to give worth his pain in coming?

Angela was an anxiety to Kate and a responsibility to Mr. Morehouse. The banker would have liked to send his friends to call upon Mrs. May, but she was in no mood to meet people. Then he suggested that she should go to Del Monte for the summer and watch the beginning of the new home, but she dismissed this idea, saying that as the architect had not yet even finished his plan it would be a long time before the house could reach an interesting stage.

"We all go somewhere in summer," Mr. Morehouse urged. Whereupon Angela merely shrugged her shoulders. "You who live here may want a change," she said. "I've had plenty of changes. I'm very happy where I am, thanks."

But she did not look happy, and Kate, who loved her, realized the alteration far more keenly than Mr. Morehouse, though even he felt vaguely that something had gone wrong with the Princess di Sereno. Kate, who knew well what a difference happiness could make in a woman's health and looks, guessed that the loss of her mistress's colour and spirits was connected with the disappearance of Hilliard. A paragraph she had read in that exciting number of the Illustrated London News had, together with some vague hints unconsciously dropped by Angela and a few words of the banker's overheard, set Kate's wits to working, and thus she arrived, through sympathy, at something like the truth. But Mr. Morehouse's diagnosis of the case had in it no such romantic ingredient as hopeless love.

He alone in America (since Theo Dene was gone, and Kate merely suspected) knew that Mrs. May was the Princess di Sereno, who had never been a wife to Paolo di Sereno except in name. He knew that the Princess had grievances, and that she had left her identity in the Old World in the wish to forget the past completely. Knowing this, when a certain piece of news came his way he felt it his disagreeable duty to pass it on to Mrs. May. And it was the very piece of news which had set Theo Dene wondering whether Angela "knew about the Prince."

Most California journals are apt to give local matters of interest precedence over affairs at a distance, and so it was that (though Angela usually glanced through a newspaper every day or two during her travels) she had never come upon Paolo di Sereno's name except in that old copy of the Illustrated London News. There she learned how well he was amusing himself while Mrs. May saw California under Nick Hilliard's guidance. But after that came a blank. She knew only that he and a somewhat notorious woman were making ascents together in an aeroplane. But it remained for Mr. Morehouse to tell her of the sensation the pair were creating in Europe.

There was a woman—indeed, there was invariably a woman, though not always the same—whose flaunting friendship with the Prince had fixed Angela's resolve to turn her back on the old life. The woman had begun a career on the very humblest plane, had become an artist's model, then had learned to sing and dance, and at length her reputation as a beauty had made her name famous. A marquis had married her, and when his heart was broken and his money spent, had obligingly killed himself in an inconspicuous and gentlemanly manner. After that his widow had achieved an even greater popular success, and had attracted the attention of Paolo di Sereno.

It was about this time that Angela left Rome, and what Theo Dene wondered if Mrs. May "knew about the Prince," was his hope to break the record for distance in a new aeroplane. Mr. Morehouse, who took one or two French and English illustrated weeklies as well as New York daily papers, saw these things as soon as Theo Dene saw them; and, when Angela returned to San Francisco from Bakersfield, he told her of the Prince's project.

"I reasoned," he said, "that it would be better for you to hear what is going on from me rather than be exposed to a surprise and shock from some London or Paris paper lying on a hotel table."

Angela interrupted him to reply that nothing the Prince di Sereno could do had power to shock her, for they had never been really in each other's lives, and had now passed out of one another's orbits forever. In spite of this assurance, however, when Mr. Morehouse saw the Princess looking pale and listless taking little interest in the plans for her new house, he attributed the change to humiliation, or possibly even to fears for the Prince's safety, for women are strange. Luckily she could not be annoyed in this new country where she would make her home, for nobody knew who she was or could associate her with the Prince's eccentricities! Nevertheless, Mr. Morehouse thought it natural that her health and spirits should suffer; and because of his old and close friendship with Franklin Merriam he longed to find some wholesome distraction for Angela.

But after all it was Kate, not he, who succeeded in supplying it. Poor Kate, so near to, yet so far from, Oregon, dared in her insignificance to follow her mistress's example. Though she would have had a hand cut off rather than "give notice" to her beloved lady, as a matter of fact, she was pining; Tim was growing impatient. His affairs were marching well. Something had been saved out of the disaster caused by his dishonest partner. He had got in with a "good man," and they believed that together they would some day "beat the world" with their apples. Already they had obtained a London market. There wasn't much ready money to spare yet; but Tim could manage to pay Kate's way from San Francisco to Portland, and on to his place, if she would come. Besides, there was her nest egg, her dowry, from the sale of the gold bag.

Of course, Kate was dying to go, but would not even tell her sad-eyed, pale-cheeked mistress that Tim was wanting her. It was only when, one day, Angela noticed how miserable poor Kate was looking, that little by little she drew out the whole truth. Then she was roused to interest, and forgetfulness of herself.

"I'll tell you what I will do, Kate," she said with more animation than she had shown for weeks. "I'll take Mr. Morehouse's very latest advice, and run up north to Lake Tahoe, to stay till my new house is born. Then, instead of your going to your Tim, he must come to you; and I'll give you a wedding—oh, a beautiful wedding, with a white silk dress and a veil and orange blossoms, and a cake big enough to last you the rest of your life. You're not to make any objections, because I shouldn't be happy to have you stay with me now that Tim's ready, and you know the idea always was for you to go when I'd reached my farthest point north and nearest to Oregon. Besides, it will do me good to plan for a wedding. And I mean to give you your trousseau. You shall get the things here in San Francisco before we start for Tahoe."

So that was why one evening Nick read in a San Francisco paper that "Mrs. May, who has been staying at the Fairmont Hotel for several weeks, left last night for Lake Tahoe, where she has engaged rooms at the famous Tahoe Tavern, and may remain for some time."

Afterward, when he sent the paper on to Sara Wilkins, as he did send papers now, with parcels of books and magazines, she too noticed the paragraph.

"His star's gone as far north and as far from him as she can possibly go and be in California," thought the school-teacher. And because Nick was right, and her good little face hid a heart that was still better, she was not glad, but very, very sorry.

When Kate was married to her good-looking Irishman, and the little excitement of the wedding was over, Angela began to feel rather desolate.

There were a great many pleasant people at the tavern who would have been kind to the stranger if she had let them be kind, but they were all so merry and had so many intimate interests of their own that their goodness to her seemed only to emphasize her loneliness. Kate had insisted on "lending" her Timmy in fact, the bride and bridegroom both insisted, for there was no doubt in their minds that the black cat had brought them good fortune. Now they had all the fortune they wanted, to "go on with," and as poor, pretty Mrs. May seemed "a bit down on her luck," they would leave her Timmy to bring it back again. And really the topaz-eyed creature, in its becoming jade collar—a gift from Nick Hilliard—was often a comfort to Angela, curled up in her lap and purring cosily under her book as she read. It seemed curiously fond of her, even fonder than of Kate, and had "taken to" her from the first.

Angela had travelled through a region of snowsheds to reach the lake in the heart of the Sierra Nevada, and the scenery was as different from any she had met in California as was her mood from the mood of the south. At Tahoe she was a mile above sea-level, and ringed in by higher mountains which had not lost their dazzling crowns of snow.

On the shore of the long blue lake that mirrored eternally, a clear, cool sky and immense dark trees—pines and cedars—Angela felt that a line had been drawn between her and her California past, with its flame of golden, poppies and flowers of the forest. Here she had reached a high note of beauty which rang crystalline as a silver rod striking upon ice. The place gave Angela a sense of purity and remoteness which she had felt by no lake-shore of Europe. The charm of other lakes had been their villa-sprinkled shores, their historical associations. The charm of Tahoe was loneliness. She liked to row out on the water alone, and rest on her oars to look down, down, through miles (it seemed) of liquid sapphire and emerald blending together.

Tahoe was not remote, really since luxurious trains had brought it into close touch with San Francisco and with the East; but Angela liked to cultivate the impression of remoteness as if she were a nun in retreat, and the beauty was of a kind that called to her spirit, making renunciation easier than in the luscious south, scented with lilies and roses. Tahoe had its roses, too; but its chief perfume was of pines and the pure freshness of breezes that blow over water and snow mountains.

The journey, too, had prepared her for the isolation that she craved; the glimpse of tragic Donner Lake, where the pioneers starved and agonized in 1848; the wild Truckee River sweeping its flood past thickets of pale sagebrush and forests of black pines; the tang of cold and the smell of snow in the air; the lonely farmhouses folded among green hills; and the primitive look of Truckee town with its little frame buildings called by pretentious foreign names; Firenze Saloon; Roma Hotel.

Nobody else, however, seemed to have the half-sad, half-delicious sense of remoteness from the world, at Tahoe, which Angela had. That month was very gay, and the immense verandas of the tavern were flower-gardens of pretty girls—those American "summer girls," of whom Angela had often heard. They swam, and boated and fished, and, above all, flirted, for there were always plenty of men; and in the evenings they danced in the ballroom of the casino, built on the edge of the water.

Angela never tired of going from end to end of the lake in the steamboat that set out from the tavern jetty in the morning and returned in the afternoon. The captain, a great character, let her sit in a room behind the pilot-box, where her luncheon was brought by an eager-eyed youth working his way through college by serving as steward in the holidays. He was in love with a girl at his university, equally poor and equally plucky; but because she was earning dollars as a waitress at the tavern, the boy thought Tahoe a place "where you couldn't help being happy." Angela thought it a place where, more than most others, it might be possible to find peace, though happiness was gone.

She no longer opened her diary. Never again, she told herself, would she keep a record of her days. But, some time—years from now, maybe—when she could read what she had written without a heartache, she would open the unfinished volume where she had broken off a sentence in the great redwood forest. She might be able to think of Nick Hilliard then without longing for him; but that time seemed far, very far away.

One August evening Angela came back from an excursion to the top of Mount Tallac. She was tired, and had made up her mind to dine in her own sitting-room, then to go immediately to bed; but asking for her key she was told that "a lady was waiting to see her; had been waiting nearly all day."

"A lady!" she echoed. Could it be Mrs. Gaylor? Angela hoped not; for, though she had not heard from Nick those things which Carmen had feared and expected her to hear, she guessed something of Carmen's hate. The fact that she had not been allowed to go back; that Kate had arrived in Bakersfield with a story of Mrs. Gaylor's being called suddenly away from home; that Carmen had never answered a short letter she wrote; all these things roused her suspicions. Indeed, she had even gone so far as to associate the box of poison-oak leaves with Mrs. Gaylor; and now the thought that the Spanish woman might have followed her to Tahoe sent a shiver through her veins. Who could the lady be, if not Carmen Gaylor? Who but Carmen would wait patiently for her coming, through a whole day?

For an instant Angela was tempted to answer: "I'm too tired to see any one this evening." But that would be cowardly. Besides, she was curious to see her visitor, whoever it might be.

"The lady's waiting in the veranda now," said a hotel clerk. "She's been here ever since morning, but she went away at lunch time and came back afterward. I don't know what she means to do to-night, for the train for Truckee will be leaving in a few minutes, and she hasn't engaged a room."

Angela went out on the veranda, feeling' a little tense and excited, but when a small, blue-frocked, gray-hatted figure, dejectedly lost in a big rocking-chair, was pointed out to her, excitement died while bewilderment grew.

Her first thought was that she had never seen this countrified-looking person before, but as her guest turned, raising to hers a pair of singularly intelligent, rather frightened eyes, she knew that she had met the same glance from the same eyes somewhere before.

The little woman's face was so pale, so tired, her whole personality so pathetic yet indomitable, that Angela's heart softened.

"How do you do?" she asked kindly. "I hear you have come to see me, so we must know each other, I'm sure——"

The visitor was on her feet, the chair, from which she had sprung with a nervous jerk, rocking frantically as if a nervous ghost were sitting in it.

"We don't know each other exactly," Miss Wilkins hastened to explain, as though eager not to begin with false pretences. "The only time you ever saw me was at Santa Barbara last May, but you were very good to me and—and I found out your name——"

"Of course. I remember quite well!" Mrs. May smiled reassuringly, for the poor little thing was certainly terrified and ill at ease as well as tired. Angela sprang to the conclusion that the young woman was in money difficulties, and having remembered the loan of the sitting-room at Santa Barbara had somehow found her way to Tahoe in the hope of getting help. Well, she should have it. Angela was only too glad to be able to do something for any one in trouble. "I'm glad to see you again," she said, as if it were quite a commonplace thing for a stranger to have dropped apparently from the clouds in search of her. "But I'm so sorry you've had to wait. Perhaps you wrote and I haven't got the letter yet?"

"No, I didn't write. I couldn't have explained in a letter," said the weary-faced visitor; "and maybe you wouldn't have wanted me to come if you'd known before-hand. I thought if I'd travelled all this way though, just to speak to you, you wouldn't refuse. I've been two nights on the way."

"Oh, how dreadful!" exclaimed Angela. "You must let me get you a room at once. Some people are leaving to-night. They surely can put you up in the hotel."

"Thank you very much," returned the young woman, "but I couldn't impose on you as your guest. You'll see that when I've told you why I came. I can't get away to Truckee, I know, for the train goes too soon, but I'll take a room at some simpler place where it's cheaper than this."

"We'll talk of that later," said Angela soothingly. "Now I hope you'll come to my rooms and rest, and tell me about yourself. When we're both washed and refreshed we'll dine together in my sitting-room quietly."

"But it isn't about myself I want to talk," protested the stranger. "I must tell you my name, Mrs. May. Of course, you've forgotten it. It's Miss Wilkins—Sara Wilkins."

She didn't want to talk about herself! That was puzzling and didn't fit in with Angela's deductions. However, she made no comment, and talking of her day on Mount Tallac, escorted Miss Wilkins to a pretty sitting-room, which in her absence had been supplied with fresh flowers.

"Shall we talk first?" Angela asked. "Or would you like to rest and bathe——"

"If you're not too tired yourself to listen to me, I'd rather talk now," Sara answered with a kind of suppressed desperation. "But you do look tired. You're thinner and paler than at Santa Barbara! Yet I've been screwing my courage up to this for so long I can hardly bear to wait."

"If I was tired I've forgotten it now," said Angela. "And I'm as eager to begin as you can be. But you mustn't feel that it needs courage to speak out, whatever you have to say. And if there's any way for me to make it easier for you, I should be so glad if you could give me just the slightest hint. Shall we both sit down on this sofa together?"

"You sit there," replied Sara. "I don't want to be comfortable. I couldn't lean back. I'm all on edge."

"Oh, but you mustn't be 'on edge'!"

"I don't tell you that to get sympathy, Mrs. May," said the school-teacher, "but only because I'd like you to understand before I begin that I haven't come just to be 'cheeky' and bold. I came because I felt I must—on somebody's account, if not yours. For myself, I didn't want to force myself on you. I didn't want it one bit! And now I'm here, if I could do what I feel most like doing, I'd run away as fast as ever I could go, without saying one more word."

"You almost frighten me," said Angela, her eyes dark and serious. "Have I done something dreadful that—that I ought to be warned not to do again, and you have come to tell me because you think I was once a little kind to you? Not that I was really kind—for it was nothing at all that I did."

Miss Wilkins, sitting stiff and upright on the smallest, straightest, least luxurious chair in the pretty room, was silent for an instant, as if collecting all her forces. "No," she answered at last. "It wouldn't be fair to say exactly that. And yet you have done something dreadful. Oh, my goodness, this is even harder to get out than—than I supposed it would be, for, of course, you'll think it's not my business anyhow. And isn't or wouldn't be if—if——"

"If—what?" Angela prompted her gently.

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."

"Oh!" cried Angela, her cheeks scarlet. "I said nothing—nothing which could make him feel that I didn't think him a gentleman. I——"

"That's what I told him," Sara broke in. "I knew his reason for employing Jerrold, because he made up a sort of allegory about a moth loving a star and trying to fly up to heaven and be near her, or something like that. I said that a real star couldn't be stupid enough to think him a moth, or, anyway, not a common one. And he said, 'That's just what she does think me, common.' I knew he meant you, though he didn't speak your name then. And I thought to myself, 'She didn't look like a silly doll stuffed with sawdust,' I did you the justice to believe that a great lady, experienced in the world, would know and appreciate a man. I'm just nobody at all, Mrs. May; but even I'm clever enough for that. I'm sure as fate, if I were acquainted with all the best kings and princes there are in the world, I couldn't find a better gentleman than Nick Hilliard. Yet according to him you didn't have the eyes to see what he was worth. You not only turned him down, but turned him down saying he was too common for you."

Angela could stand no more. It was as if the fierce little woman in dusty blue serge had struck her in the face. She sprang up, very white, her eyes blazing. "It is not true," she said in a low voice. "He couldn't have told you I said that."

"He told me you said just the same thing: that he was 'impossible.' That was the word—a cruel, cruel word."

She was up too, the fiery little school-teacher, and they faced each other—the tall girl, white as lily grown in a king's garden, and the little snub-nosed, freckled country schoolma'am.

"Do you mean when I used the word 'impossible,'" asked Angela, "that he thought I meant it in such a way—meant to tell him that he was an impossible person?"

"Yes, I do mean just that."

"You're sure of what you say?"

"Dreadfully sure. When I'd got that much out of him—somehow. I hardly know how—I felt wounded and sore, as I knew he was feeling, and, would feel all the rest of his life. Oh, I'd have given mine for him! I would then, and I would now, to make him happy. That's why I came up here—to find out whether, after all, there could be any misunderstanding between you that could be righted. He doesn't know I've come. He thinks I'm staying with a friend in San Francisco. I don't want him to know, ever. I should die of shame. I wish I could talk in some wise, clever way to you, and get you to see what a mistake you've made. He loves you so, Mrs. May!"

Then a thing happened which was the last that Sara Wilkins had expected. With a stifled cry Angela turned away, and, covering her face with both hands, sobbed as if her heart would break.

The little school-teacher trembled all over. She had come here—giving her time and money—far more than she could afford—and her nerve-tissue, in Nick Hilliard's cause; and all in the hope of making his "star" see the error of her ways. But when the cruel star broke down and cried uncontrollably, in anguish of soul, the hardness and anger which Nick's champion had cherished melted into pity.

"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."

"No," said Sara Wilkins, "that is not the right way; not for him. It might be with a vain man. But he doesn't get over it. He doesn't stop loving you. Only the pain is worse because he thinks you scorned him. Mrs. May, I implore you to write him a letter. I can't take a message, because he mustn't know I came to see you. It would spoil it all for him, I think. Write as if it were of your own accord. Don't explain in the letter. Letters are such hard, unsatisfactory things. The best one you could write wouldn't make up to him a bit for what he's suffered and what he must go on suffering, for you couldn't help studying your words, and they'd be stiff and disappointing, no matter how hard you tried to say the things just right. Ask him to come here and let you explain in your own words why you seemed so harsh. Only, warn him that it isn't to change your mind about—about saying yes. It would be awful to rush up here happy and hopeful, only to find out—what he'll have to find out."

"You don't understand," said Angela. "I care too much to dare see him again. I couldn't trust myself. I——"

"Ah, but you could trust him. He's strong and high in his nature—like the great redwoods."

"Yes, like the great redwoods," Angela echoed, in a whisper.

"He'd be a rock, too—a rock to rely upon," Sara went on. "Do this, Mrs. May. Do it for my sake. I know it's the right thing. It will give him back his self-respect. That's even more important than happiness, especially to him. I've done all I could for you—not much, but my best. Do this for me, will you?"

"Yes, I will!" Angela answered suddenly and impulsively. She put out her hands to the little school-teacher and drew her close. They kissed each other, the two women who loved Nick Hilliard.