boarding house. Books were great friends of his, he admitted
somewhat shyly. She was welcome to borrow any she cared to have.

They saw a good deal of each other during the next fortnight, too much for
the school-teacher's peace of mind; for the oftener they met the more was
she convinced that Nick was in love, perhaps hopelessly in love, with
another woman as different from herself as a lily from a dusty sprig of
lavender. Then, one day when Nick had started to carry her some books and
they had met on the way, the two sat down and talked by the side of the
blue, brackish lake, sheltering from the sun behind a bank of yellow sand
that was like the high back of a queerly shaped throne. At a distance
passed Green, the landlord of the Eureka, out walking with his little
daughter, and in speaking of him and the odd folk who stopped at the green
hotel the "Dook" was mentioned. He had disappeared from Lucky Star City
some time before, but Miss Wilkins had met and disliked him.

"Horrid little pretentious toad!" she exclaimed sharply. "He was always
talking to every one he could get hold of about his family and his swell
friends and Oxford. But I don't believe any of his stories. He was just
worse than nobody at all; and East I've met real nice Englishmen who had
a _lovely_ accent, and wouldn't be found dead drawling like he did."

Nick laughed. "You're jolly right," he said; and then being in a humorous
as well as confidential mood, he told the story of himself and Montagu
Jerrold.

"Wasn't I a Johnny?" he asked at the end. "Served me right for trying to
make a silk purse of myself. Can't be done, I guess."

"But you are a silk purse!" Sara protested indignantly. "How can you talk
about yourself the way you do?"

"I'm a little down on my luck these days," he answered. "Did you ever read
about the moth who loved a star? I guess, when that moth got to thinking
of himself and his chances, he saw himself pretty well as he really was,
poor old chap. Fusty brown wings, too many legs, antennae the wrong shape,
and a clumsy way of usin' 'em. I've gone and made a moth of myself, Miss
Wilkins."

"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