part in the affair.

“Vice-consul, I should say,--and I wish to lay them both before you, in

order that--”

“Oh, that is all right,” said Clementina sweetly. “I'm glad there is a

will. I was afraid there wasn't any at all. Mr. Bennam and I looked for

it everywhe'e.” She smiled upon the Rev. Mr. Orson, who silently handed

her a paper. It was the will which Milray had written for Mrs. Lander,

and which, with whatever crazy motive, she had sent to her husband's

kindred. It provided that each of them should be given five thousand

dollars out of the estate, and that then all should go to Clementina. It

was the will Mrs. Lander told her she had made, but she had never seen

the paper before, and the legal forms hid the meaning from her so

that she was glad to have the vice-consul make it clear. Then she said

tranquilly, “Yes, that is the way I supposed it was.”

Mr. Orson by no means shared her calm. He did not lift his voice, but

on the level it had taken it became agitated. “Mrs. Lander gave me the

address of her lawyer in Boston when she sent me the will, and I made a

point of calling on him when I went East, to sail. I don't know why she

wished me to come out to her, but being sick, I presume she naturally

wished to see some of her own family.”

He looked at Clementina as if he thought she might dispute this, but she

consented at her sweetest, “Oh, yes, indeed,” and he went on:

“I found her affairs in a very different condition from what she

seemed to think. The estate was mostly in securities which had not been

properly looked after, and they had depreciated until they were some of

them not worth the paper they were printed on. The house in Boston is

mortgaged up to its full value, I should say; and I should say that Mrs.

Lander did not know where she stood. She seemed to think that she was a

very rich woman, but she lived high, and her lawyer said he never could

make her understand how the money was going. Mr. Lander seemed to

lose his grip, the year he died, and engaged in some very unfortunate

speculations; I don't know whether he told her. I might enter into

details--”

“Oh, that is not necessary,” said Clementina, politely, witless of the

disastrous quality of the facts which Mr. Orson was imparting.

“But the sum and substance of it all is that there will not be more than

enough to pay the bequests to her own family, if there is that.”

Clementina looked with smiling innocence at the vice-consul.

“That is to say,” he explained, “there won't be anything at all for you,

Miss Claxon.”

“Well, that's what I always told Mrs. Lander I ratha, when she brought

it up. I told her she ought to give it to his family,” said Clementina,

with a satisfaction in the event which the vice-consul seemed unable to

share, for he remained gloomily silent. “There is that last money I drew

on the letter of credit, you can give that to Mr. Orson.”

“I have told him about that money,” said the vice-consul, dryly. “It

will be handed over to him when the estate is settled, if there isn't

enough to pay the bequests without it.”

“And the money which Mrs. Landa gave me before that,” she pursued,

eagerly. Mr. Orson had the effect of pricking up his ears, though it was

in fact merely a gleam of light that came into his eyes.

“That's yours,” said the vice-consul, sourly, almost savagely. “She

didn't give it to you without she wanted you to have it, and she didn't

expect you to pay her bequests with it. In my opinion,” he burst out,

in a wrathful recollection of his own sufferings from Mrs. Lander, “she

didn't give you a millionth part of your due for all the trouble she

made you; and I want Mr. Orson to understand that, right here.”

Clementina turned her impartial gaze upon Mr. Orson as if to verify the

impression of this extreme opinion upon him; he looked as if he neither

accepted nor rejected it, and she concluded the sentence which the

vice-consul had interrupted. “Because I ratha not keep it, if there

isn't enough without it.”

The vice-consul gave way to violence. “It's none of your business

whether there's enough or not. What you've got to do is to keep what

belongs to you, and I'm going to see that you do. That's what I'm here

for.” If this assumption of official authority did not awe Clementina,

at least it put a check upon her headlong self-sacrifice. The

vice-consul strengthened his hold upon her by asking, “What would you

do. I should like to know, if you gave that up?”

“Oh, I should get along,” she returned, light-heartedly, but upon

questioning herself whether she should turn to Miss Milray for help,

or appeal to the vice-consul himself, she was daunted a little, and she

added, “But just as you say, Mr. Bennam.”

“I say, keep what fairly belongs to you. It's only two or three hundred

dollars at the outside,” he explained to Mr. Orson's hungry eyes; but

perhaps the sum did not affect the country minister's imagination as

trifling; his yearly salary must sometimes have been little more.

The whole interview left the vice-consul out of humor with both parties

to the affair; and as to Clementina, between the ideals of a perfect

little saint, and a perfect little simpleton he remained for the present

unable to class her.

XXXV.

Clementina and the Vice-Consul afterwards agreed that Mrs. Lander must

have sent the will to Mr. Orson in one of those moments of suspicion

when she distrusted everyone about her, or in that trouble concerning

her husband's kindred which had grown upon her more and more, as a means

of assuring them that they were provided for.

“But even then,” the vice-consul concluded, “I don't see why she wanted

this man to come out here. The only explanation is that she was a little

off her base towards the last. That's the charitable supposition.”

“I don't think she was herself, some of the time,” Clementina assented

in acceptance of the kindly construction.

The vice-consul modified his good will toward Mrs. Lander's memory so

far as to say, “Well, if she'd been somebody else most of the time, it

would have been an improvement.”

The talk turned upon Mr. Orson, and what he would probably do. The

vice-consul had found him a cheap lodging, at his request, and he seemed

to have settled down at Venice either without the will or without the

power to go home, but the vice-consul did not know where he ate, or what

he did with himself except at the times when he came for letters.

Once or twice when he looked him up he found him writing, and then the

minister explained that he had promised to “correspond” for an organ of

his sect in the Northwest; but he owned that there was no money in it.

He was otherwise reticent and even furtive in his manner. He did not

seem to go much about the city, but kept to his own room; and if he was

writing of Venice it must have been chiefly from his acquaintance

with the little court into which his windows looked. He affected the

vice-consul as forlorn and helpless, and he pitied him and rather liked

him as a fellow-victim of Mrs. Lander.

One morning Mr. Orson came to see Clementina, and after a brief passage

of opinion upon the weather, he fell into an embarrassed silence from

which he pulled himself at last with a visible effort. “I hardly know

how to lay before you what I have to say, Miss Claxon,” he began, “and

I must ask you to put the best construction upon it. I have never been

reduced to a similar distress before. You would naturally think that I

would turn to the vice-consul, on such an occasion; but I feel, through

our relation to the--to Mrs. Lander--ah--somewhat more at home with

you.”

He stopped, as if he wished to be asked his business, and she entreated

him, “Why, what is it, Mr. Osson? Is there something I can do? There

isn't anything I wouldn't!”

A gleam, watery and faint, which still could not be quite winked away,

came into his small eyes. “Why, the fact is, could you--ah--advance me

about five dollars?”

“Why, Mr. Orson!” she began, and he seemed to think she wished to

withdraw her offer of help, for he interposed.

“I will repay it as soon as I get an expected remittance from home.

I came out on the invitation of Mrs. Lander, and as her guest, and I

supposed--”

“Oh, don't say a wo'd!” cried Clementina, but now that he had begun he

was powerless to stop.

“I would not ask, but my landlady has pressed me for her rent--I suppose

she needs it--and I have been reduced to the last copper--”

The girl whose eyes the tears of self pity so rarely visited, broke into

a sob that seemed to surprise her visitor. But she checked herself as

with a quick inspiration: “Have you been to breakfast?”

“Well--ah--not this morning,” Mr. Orson admitted, as if to imply that

having breakfasted some other morning might be supposed to serve the

purpose.

She left him and ran to the door. “Maddalena, Maddalena!” she called;

and Maddalena responded with a frightened voice from the direction of

the kitchen:

“Vengo subito!”

She hurried out with the coffee-pot in her hand, as if she had just

taken it up when Clementina called; and she halted for the whispered

colloquy between them which took place before she set it down on the

table already laid for breakfast; then she hurried out of the room

again. She came back with a cantaloupe and grapes, and cold ham, and put

them before Clementina and her guest, who both ignored the hunger with

which he swept everything before him. When his famine had left nothing,

he said, in decorous compliment:

“That is very good coffee, I should think the genuine berry, though I am

told that they adulterate coffee a great deal in Europe.”

“Do they?” asked Clementina. “I didn't know it.”

She left him still sitting before the table, and came back with some

bank-notes in her hand. “Are you sure you hadn't betta take moa?” she

asked.

“I think that five dollars will be all that I shall require,” he

answered, with dignity. “I should be unwilling to accept more. I shall

undoubtedly receive some remittances soon.”

“Oh, I know you will,” Clementina returned, and she added, “I am waiting

for lettas myself; I don't think any one ought to give up.”

The preacher ignored the appeal which was in her tone rather than her

words, and went on to explain at length the circumstances of his having

come to Europe so unprovided against chances. When he wished to excuse

his imprudence, she cried out, “Oh, don't say a wo'd! It's just like my

own fatha,” and she told him some things of her home which apparently

did not interest him very much. He had a kind of dull, cold

self-absorption in which he was indeed so little like her father

that only her kindness for the lonely man could have justified her in

thinking there was any resemblance.

She did not see him again for a week, and meantime she did not tell the

vice-consul of what had happened. But an anxiety for the minister began

to mingle with her anxieties for herself; she constantly wondered why

she did not hear from her lover, and she occasionally wondered whether

Mr. Orson were not falling into want again. She had decided to betray

his condition to the vice-consul, when he came, bringing the money she

had lent him. He had received a remittance from an unexpected source;

and he hoped she would excuse his delay in repaying her loan. She wished

not to take the money, at least till he was quite sure he should not

want it, but he insisted.

“I have enough to keep me, now, till I hear from other sources, with the

means for returning home. I see no object in continuing here, under the

circumstances.”

In the relief which she felt for him Clementina's heart throbbed with a

pain which was all for herself. Why should she wait any longer either?

For that instant she abandoned the hope which had kept her up so long; a

wave of homesickness overwhelmed her.

“I should like to go back, too,” she said. “I don't see why I'm

staying.”

“Mr. Osson, why can't you let me”--she was going to say--“go home with

you?” But she really said what was also in her heart, “Why can't you let

me give you the money to go home? It is all Mrs. Landa's money, anyway.”

“There is certainly that view of the matter,” he assented with

a promptness that might have suggested a lurking grudge for the

vice-consul's decision that she ought to keep the money Mrs. Lander had

given her.

But Clementina urged unsuspiciously: “Oh, yes, indeed! And I shall feel

better if you take it. I only wish I could go home, too!”

The minister was silent while he was revolving, with whatever scruple

or reluctance, a compromise suitable to the occasion. Then he said, “Why

should we not return together?”

“Would you take me?” she entreated.

“That should be as you wished. I am not much acquainted with the usages

in such matters, but I presume that it would be entirely practicable. We

could ask the vice-consul.”

“Yes--”

“He must have had considerable experience in cases of the kind. Would

your friends meet you in New York, or--”

“I don't know,” said Clementina with a pang for the thought of a meeting

she had sometimes fancied there, when her lover had come out for her,

and her father had been told to come and receive them. “No,” she sighed,

“the'e wouldn't be time to let them know. But it wouldn't make

any difference. I could get home from New Yo'k alone,” she added,

listlessly. Her spirits had fallen again. She saw that she could not

leave Venice till she had heard in some sort from the letter she had

written. “Perhaps it couldn't be done, after all. But I will see Mr.

Bennam about it, Mr. Osson; and I know he will want you to have that

much of the money. He will be coming he'e, soon.”

He rose upon what he must have thought her hint, and said, “I should not

wish to have him swayed against his judgment.”

The vice-consul came not long after the minister had left her, and she

began upon what she wished to do for him.

The vice-consul was against it. “I would rather lend him the money out

of my own pocket. How are you going to get along yourself, if you let

him have so much?”

She did not answer at once. Then she said, hopelessly, “I've a great

mind to go home with him. I don't believe there's any use waiting here

any longa.” The vice-consul could not say anything to this. She added,

“Yes, I believe I will go home. We we'e talking about it, the other day,

and he is willing to let me go with him.”

“I should think he would be,” the vice-consul retorted in his

indignation for her. “Did you offer to pay for his passage?”

“Yes,” she owned, “I did,” and again the vice-consul could say nothing.

“If I went, it wouldn't make any difference whether it took it all or

not. I should have plenty to get home from New York with.”

“Well,” the vice-consul assented, dryly, “it's for you to say.”

“I know you don't want me to do it!”

“Well, I shall miss you,” he answered, evasively.

“And I shall miss you, too, Mr. Bennam. Don't you believe it? But if I

don't take this chance to get home, I don't know when I shall eva have

anotha. And there isn't any use waiting--no, there isn't!”

The vice-consul laughed at the sort of imperative despair in her tone.

“How are you going? Which way, I mean.”

They counted up Clementina's debts and assets, and they found that if

she took the next steamer from Genoa, which was to sail in four days,

she would have enough to pay her own way and Mr. Orson's to New York,

and still have some thirty dollars over, for her expenses home to

Middlemount. They allowed for a second cabin-passage, which the

vice-consul said was perfectly good on the Genoa steamers. He rather

urged the gentility and comfort of the second cabin-passage, but his

reasons in favor of it were wasted upon Clementina's indifference;

she wished to get home, now, and she did not care how. She asked the

vice-consul to see the minister for her, and if he were ready and

willing, to telegraph for their tickets. He transacted the business so

promptly that he was able to tell her when he came in the evening that

everything was in train. He excused his coming; he said that now she

was going so soon, he wanted to see all he could of her. He offered no

excuse when he came the next morning; but he said he had got a letter

for her and thought she might want to have it at once.

He took it out of his hat and gave it to her. It was addressed in

Hinkle's writing; her answer had come at last; she stood trembling with

it in her hand.

The vice-consul smiled. “Is that the one?”

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“All right.” He took his hat, and set it on the back of his head before

he left her without other salutation.

Then Clementina opened her letter. It was in a woman's hand, and the

writer made haste to explain at the beginning that she was George W.

Hinkle's sister, and that she was writing for him; for though he was

now out of danger, he was still very weak, and they had all been anxious

about him. A month before, he had been hurt in a railroad collision,

and had come home from the West, where the accident happened, suffering

mainly from shock, as his doctor thought; he had taken to his bed at

once, and had not risen from it since. He had been out of his head a

great part of the time, and had been forbidden everything that could

distress or excite him. His sister said that she was writing for him now

as soon as he had seen Clementina's letter; it had been forwarded from

one address to another, and had at last found him there at his home in

Ohio. He wished to say that he would come out for Clementina as soon as

he was allowed to undertake the journey, and in the meantime she must

let him know constantly where she was. The letter closed with a few

words of love in his own handwriting.

Clementina rose from reading it, and put on her hat in a bewildered

impulse to go to him at once; she knew, in spite of all the cautions and

reserves of the letter that he must still be very sick. When she came

out of her daze she found that she could only go to the vice-consul. She

put the letter in his hands to let it explain itself. “You'll undastand,

now,” she said. “What shall I do?”

When he had read it, he smiled and answered, “I guess I understood

pretty well before, though I wasn't posted on names. Well, I suppose

you'll want to layout most of your capital on cables, now?”

“Yes,” she laughed, and then she suddenly lamented, “Why didn't they

telegraph?”

“Well, I guess he hadn't the head for it,” said the vice-consul, “and

the rest wouldn't think of it. They wouldn't, in the country.”

Clementina laughed again; in joyous recognition of the fact, “No, my

fatha wouldn't, eitha!”

The vice-consul reached for his hat, and he led the way to Clementina's

gondola at his garden gate, in greater haste than she. At the telegraph

office he framed a dispatch which for expansive fullness and precision

was apparently unexampled in the experience of the clerk who took it

and spelt over its English with them. It asked an answer in the

vice-consul's care, and, “I'll tell you what, Miss Claxon,” he said with

a husky weakness in his voice, “I wish you'd let this be my treat.”

She understood. “Do you really, Mr. Bennam?”

“I do indeed.”

“Well, then, I will,” she said, but when he wished to include in his

treat the dispatch she sent home to her father announcing her coming,

she would not let him.

He looked at his watch, as they rowed away. “It's eight o'clock here,

now, and it will reach Ohio about six hours earlier; but you can't

expect an answer tonight, you know.”

“No”--She had expected it though, he could see that.

“But whenever it comes, I'll bring it right round to you. Now it's all

going to be straight, don't you be afraid, and you're going home the

quickest way you can get there. I've been looking up the sailings, and

this Genoa boat will get you to New York about as soon as any could from

Liverpool. Besides there's always a chance of missing connections and

losing time between here and England. I should stick to the Genoa boat.”

“Oh I shall,” said Clementina, far less fidgetted than he. She was,

in fact, resting securely again in the faith which had never really

deserted her, and had only seemed for a little time to waver from her

when her hope went. Now that she had telegraphed, her heart was at

peace, and she even laughed as she answered the anxious vice-consul.

XXXVI.

The next morning Clementina watched for the vice-consul from her

balcony. She knew he would not send; she knew he would come; but it was

nearly noon before she saw him coming. They caught sight of each other

almost at the same moment, and he stood up in his boat, and waved

something white in his hand, which must be a dispatch for her.

It acknowledged her telegram and reported George still improving; his

father would meet her steamer in New York. It was very reassuring, it

was every thing hopeful; but when she had read it she gave it to the

vice-consul for encouragement.

“It's all right, Miss Claxon,” he said, stoutly. “Don't you be troubled

about Mr. Hinkle's not coming to meet you himself. He can't keep too

quiet for a while yet.”

“Oh, yes,” said Clementina, patiently.

“If you really want somebody to worry about, you can help Mr. Orson to

worry about himself!” the vice-consul went on, with the grimness he had

formerly used in speaking of Mrs. Lander. “He's sick, or he thinks he's

going to be. He sent round for me this morning, and I found him in bed.

You may have to go home alone. But I guess he's more scared than hurt.”

Her heart sank, and then rose in revolt against the mere idea of delay.

“I wonder if I ought to go and see him,” she said.

“Well, it would be a kindness,” returned the vice-consul, with a

promptness that unmasked the apprehension he felt for the sick man.

He did not offer to go with her, and she took Maddalena. She found

the minister seated in his chair beside his bed. A three days' beard

heightened the gauntness of his face; he did not move when his padrona

announced her.

“I am not any better,” he answered when she said that she was glad to

see him up. “I am merely resting; the bed is hard. I regret to say,” he

added, with a sort of formal impersonality, “that I shall be unable to

accompany you home, Miss Claxon. That is, if you still think of taking

the steamer this week.”

Her whole being had set homeward in a tide that already seemed to drift

the vessel from its moorings. “What--what do you mean?” she gasped.

“I didn't know,” he returned, “but that in view of the

circumstances--all the circumstances--you might be intending to defer

your departure to some later steamer.”

“No, no, no! I must go, now. I couldn't wait a day, an hour, a minute

after the first chance of going. You don't know what you are saying! He

might die if I told him I was not coming; and then what should I do?”

This was what Clementina said to herself; but what she said to Mr.

Orson, with an inspiration from her terror at his suggestion was, “Don't

you think a little chicken broth would do you good, Mr. Osson? I don't

believe but what it would.”

A wistful gleam came into the preacher's eyes. “It might,” he admitted,

and then she knew what must be his malady. She sent Maddalena to a

trattoria for the soup, and she did not leave him, even after she had

seen its effect upon him. It was not hard to persuade him that he had

better come home with her; and she had him there, tucked away with his

few poor belongings, in the most comfortable room the padrone could

imagine, when the vice-consul came in the evening.

“He says he thinks he can go, now,” she ended, when she had told the

vice-consul. “And I know he can. It wasn't anything but poor living.”

“It looks more like no living,” said the vice-consul. “Why didn't the

old fool let some one know that he was short of money?” He went on with

a partial transfer of his contempt of the preacher to her, “I suppose if

he'd been sick instead of hungry, you'd have waited over till the next

steamer for him.”

She cast down her eyes. “I don't know what you'll think of me. I should

have been sorry for him, and I should have wanted to stay.” She lifted

her eyes and looked the vice-consul defiantly in the face. “But he

hadn't the fust claim on me, and I should have gone--I couldn't have

helped it!--I should have gone, if he had been dying!”

“Well, you've got more horse-sense,” said the vice-consul, “than any ten

men I ever saw,” and he testified his admiration of her by putting his

arms round her, where she stood before him, and kissing her. “Don't you

mind,” he explained. “If my youngest girl had lived, she would have been

about your age.”

“Oh, it's all right, Mr. Bennam,” said Clementina.

When the time came for them to leave Venice, Mr. Orson was even eager

to go. The vice-consul would have gone with them in contempt of the

official responsibilities which he felt to be such a thankless burden,

but there was really no need of his going, and he and Clementina treated

the question with the matter-of-fact impartiality which they liked in

each other. He saw her off at the station where Maddalena had come to

take the train for Florence in token of her devotion to the signorina,

whom she would not outstay in Venice. She wept long and loud upon

Clementina's neck, so that even Clementina was once moved to put her

handkerchief to her tearless eyes.

At the last moment she had a question which she referred to the vice

consul. “Should you tell him?” she asked.

“Tell who what?” he retorted.

“Mr. Osson--that I wouldn't have stayed for him.”

“Do you think it would make you feel any better?” asked the consul, upon

reflection.

“I believe he ought to know.”

“Well, then, I guess I should do it.”

The time did not come for her confession till they had nearly reached

the end of their voyage. It followed upon something like a confession

from the minister himself, which he made the day he struggled on deck

with her help, after spending a week in his berth.

“Here is something,” he said, “which appears to be for you, Miss Claxon.

I found it among some letters for Mrs. Lander which Mr. Bennam gave me

after my arrival, and I only observed the address in looking over the

papers in my valise this morning.” He handed her a telegram. “I trust

that it is nothing requiring immediate attention.”

Clementina read it at a glance. “No,” she answered, and for a while

she could not say anything more; it was a cable message which Hinkle's

sister must have sent her after writing. No evil had come of its failure

to reach her, and she recalled without bitterness the suffering which

would have been spared her if she had got it before. It was when she

thought of the suffering of her lover from the silence which must have

made him doubt her, that she could not speak. As soon as she governed

herself against her first resentment she said, with a little sigh, “It

is all right, now, Mr. Osson,” and her stress upon the word seemed to

trouble him with no misgiving. “Besides, if you're to blame for not

noticing, so is Mr. Bennam, and I don't want to blame any one.” She

hesitated a moment before she added: “I have got to tell you something,

now, because I think you ought to know it. I am going home to be

married, Mr. Osson, and this message is from the gentleman I am going to

be married to. He has been very sick, and I don't know yet as he'll be

able to meet me in New Yo'k; but his fatha will.”

Mr. Orson showed no interest in these facts beyond a silent attention to

her words, which might have passed for an open indifference. At his time

of life all such questions, which are of permanent importance to women,

affect men hardly more than the angels who neither marry nor are given

in marriage. Besides, as a minister he must have had a surfeit of all

possible qualities in the love affairs of people intending matrimony.

As a casuist he was more reasonably concerned in the next fact which

Clementina laid before him.

“And the otha day, there in Venice when you we'e sick, and you seemed to

think that I might put off stahting home till the next steamer, I don't

know but I let you believe I would.”

“I supposed that the delay of a week or two could make no material

difference to you.”

“But now you see that it would. And I feel as if I ought to tell you--I

spoke to Mr. Bennam about it, and he didn't tell me not to--that I

shouldn't have staid, no not for anything in the wo'ld. I had to do what

I did at the time, but eva since it has seemed as if I had deceived you,

and I don't want to have it seem so any longer. It isn't because I don't

hate to tell you; I do; but I guess if it was to happen over again I

couldn't feel any different. Do you want I should tell the deck-stewahd

to bring you some beef-tea?”

“I think I could relish a small portion,” said Mr. Orson, cautiously,

and he said nothing more.

Clementina left him with her nerves in a flutter, and she did not come

back to him until she decided that it was time to help him down to his

cabin. He suffered her to do this in silence, but at the door he cleared

his throat and began:

“I have reflected upon what you told me, and I have tried to regard the

case from all points. I believe that I have done so, without personal

feeling, and I think it my duty to say, fully and freely, that I believe

you would have done perfectly right not to remain.”

“Yes,” said Clementina, “I thought you would think so.”

They parted emotionlessly to all outward effect, and when they met again

it was without a sign of having passed through a crisis of sentiment.

Neither referred to the matter again, but from that time the minister

treated Clementina with a deference not without some shadows of

tenderness such as her helplessness in Venice had apparently never

inspired. She had cast out of her mind all lingering hardness toward him

in telling him the hard truth, and she met his faint relentings with a

grateful gladness which showed itself in her constant care of him.

This helped her a little to forget the strain of the anxiety that

increased upon her as the time shortened between the last news of her

lover and the next; and there was perhaps no more exaggeration in the

import than in the terms of the formal acknowledgment which Mr. Orson

made her as their steamer sighted Fire Island Light, and they both knew

that their voyage had ended: “I may not be able to say to you in the

hurry of our arrival in New York that I am obliged to you for a good

many little attentions, which I should be pleased to reciprocate if

opportunity offered. I do not think I am going too far in saying that

they are such as a daughter might offer a parent.”

“Oh, don't speak of it, Mr. Osson!” she protested. “I haven't done

anything that any one wouldn't have done.”

“I presume,” said the minister, thoughtfully, as if retiring from an

extreme position, “that they are such as others similarly circumstanced,

might have done, but it will always be a source of satisfaction for you

to reflect that you have not neglected them.”

XXXVII.

In the crowd which thronged the steamer's dock at Hoboken, Clementina

strained her eyes to make out some one who looked enough like her lover

to be his father, and she began to be afraid that they might miss each

other when she failed. She walked slowly down the gangway, with the

people that thronged it, glad to be hidden by them from her failure, but

at the last step she was caught aside by a small blackeyed, black-haired

woman, who called out “Isn't this Miss Claxon? I'm Georrge's sisterr.

Oh, you'rre just like what he said! I knew it! I knew it!” and then

hugged her and kissed her, and passed her to the little lean dark old

man next her. “This is fatherr. I knew you couldn't tell us, because I

take afterr him, and Georrge is exactly like motherr.”

George's father took her hand timidly, but found courage to say to

his daughter, “Hadn't you betterr let her own fatherr have a chance at

herr?” and amidst a tempest of apologies and self blame from the sister,

Claxon showed himself over the shoulders of the little man.

“Why, there wa'n't no hurry, as long as she's he'a,” he said, in prompt

enjoyment of the joke, and he and Clementina sparely kissed each other.

“Why, fatha!” she said. “I didn't expect you to come to New Yo'k to meet

me.”

“Well, I didn't ha'dly expect it myself; but I'd neva been to Yo'k, and

I thought I might as well come. Things ah' ratha slack at home, just

now, anyway.”

She did not heed his explanation. “We'e you sca'ed when you got my

dispatch?”

“No, we kind of expected you'd come any time, the way you wrote afta

Mrs. Landa died. We thought something must be up.”

“Yes,” she said, absently. Then, “Whe'e's motha?” she asked.

“Well, I guess she thought she couldn't get round to it, exactly,” said

the father. “She's all right. Needn't ask you!”

“No, I'm fust-rate,” Clementina returned, with a silent joy in her

father's face and voice. She went back in it to the girl of a year ago,

and the world which had come between them since their parting rolled

away as if it had never been there.

Neither of them said anything about that. She named over her brothers

and sisters, and he answered, “Yes, yes,” in assurance of their

well-being, and then he explained, as if that were the only point

of real interest, “I see your folks waitin' he'e fo' somebody, and I

thought I'd see if it wa'n't the same one, and we kind of struck up an

acquaintance on your account befo'e you got he'e, Clem.”

“Your folks!” she silently repeated to herself. “Yes, they ah' mine!”

and she stood trying to realize the strange fact, while George's sister

poured out a voluminous comment upon Claxon's spare statement, and

George's father admired her volubility with the shut smile of toothless

age. She spoke with the burr which the Scotch-Irish settlers have

imparted to the whole middle West, but it was music to Clementina, who

heard now and then a tone of her lover in his sister's voice. In the

midst of it all she caught sight of a mute unfriended figure just

without their circle, his traveling shawl hanging loose upon his

shoulders, and the valise which had formed his sole baggage in the

voyage to and from Europe pulling his long hand out of his coat sleeve.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “here is Mr. Osson that came ova with me, fatha;

he's a relation of Mr. Landa's,” and she presented him to them all.

He shifted his valise to the left hand, and shook hands with each,

asking, “What name?” and then fell motionless again.

“Well,” said her father, “I guess this is the end of this paht of the

ceremony, and I'm goin' to see your baggage through the custom-house,

Clementina; I've read about it, and I want to know how it's done. I want

to see what you ah' tryin' to smuggle in.”

“I guess you won't find much,” she said. “But you'll want the keys,

won't you?” She called to him, as he was stalking away.

“Well, I guess that would be a good idea. Want to help, Miss Hinkle?”

“I guess we might as well all help,” said Clementina, and Mr. Orson

included himself in the invitation. He seemed unable to separate himself

from them, though the passage of Clementina's baggage through the

customs, and its delivery to an expressman for the hotel where the

Hinkles said they were staying might well have severed the last tie

between them.

“Ah' you going straight home, Mr. Osson?” she asked, to rescue him from

the forgetfulness into which they were all letting him fall.

“I think I will remain over a day,” he answered. “I may go on to Boston

before starting West.”

“Well, that's right,” said Clementina's father with the wish to approve

everything native to him, and an instinctive sense of Clementina's wish

to befriend the minister. “Betta come to oua hotel. We're all goin' to

the same one.”

“I presume it is a good one?” Mr. Orson assented.

“Well,” said Claxon, “you must make Miss Hinkle, he'a, stand it if it

ain't. She's got me to go to it.”

Mr. Orson apparently could not enter into the joke; but he accompanied

the party, which again began to forget him, across the ferry and up

the elevated road to the street car that formed the last stage of their

progress to the hotel. At this point George's sister fell silent, and

Clementina's father burst out, “Look he'a! I guess we betta not keep

this up any longa; I don't believe much in supprises, and I guess she

betta know it now!”

He looked at George's sister as if for authority to speak further, and

Clementina looked at her, too, while George's father nervously moistened

his smiling lips with the tip of his tongue, and let his twinkling eyes

rest upon Clementina's face.

“Is he at the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes,” said his sister, monosyllabic for once.

“I knew it,” said Clementina, and she was only half aware of the

fullness with which his sister now explained how he wanted to come so

much that the doctor thought he had better, but that they had made him

promise he would not try to meet her at the steamer, lest it should be

too great a trial of his strength.

“Yes,” Clementina assented, when the story came to an end and was

beginning over again.

She had an inexplicable moment when she stood before her lover in the

room where they left her to meet him alone. She faltered and he waited

constrained by her constraint.

“Is it all a mistake, Clementina?” he asked, with a piteous smile.

“No, no!”

“Am I so much changed?”

“No; you are looking better than I expected.”

“And you are not sorry--for anything?”

“No, I am--Perhaps I have thought of you too much! It seems so strange.”

“I understand,” he answered. “We have been like spirits to each other,

and now we find that we are alive and on the earth like other people;

and we are not used to it.”

“It must be something like that.”

“But if it's something else--if you have the least regret,--if you would

rather”--He stopped, and they remained looking at each other a moment.

Then she turned her head, and glanced out of the window, as if something

there had caught her sight.

“It's a very pleasant view, isn't it?” she said; and she lifted her

hands to her head, and took off her hat, with an effect of having got

home after absence, to stay.

XXXVIII.

It was possibly through some sense finer than any cognition that

Clementina felt in meeting her lover that she had taken up a new burden

rather than laid down an old one. Afterwards, when they once recurred to

that meeting, and she tried to explain for him the hesitation which she

had not been able to hide, she could only say, “I presume I didn't want

to begin unless I was sure I could carry out. It would have been silly.”

Her confession, if it was a confession, was made when one of his returns

to health, or rather one of the arrests of his unhealth, flushed them

with hope and courage; but before that first meeting was ended she knew

that he had overtasked his strength, in coming to New York, and he must

not try it further. “Fatha,” she said to Claxon, with the authority of a

woman doing her duty, “I'm not going to let Geo'ge go up to Middlemount,

with all the excitement. It will be as much as he can do to get home.

You can tell mother about it; and the rest. I did suppose it would be

Mr. Richling that would marry us, and I always wanted him to, but I

guess somebody else can do it as well.”

“Just as you say, Clem,” her father assented. “Why not Brother Osson,

he'a?” he suggested with a pleasure in the joke, whatever it was, that

the minister's relation to Clementina involved. “I guess he can put off

his visit to Boston long enough.”

“Well, I was thinking of him,” said Clementina. “Will you ask him?”

“Yes. I'll get round to it, in the mohning.”

“No--now; right away. I've been talking with Geo'ge about it; and the'e's

no sense in putting it off. I ought to begin taking care of him at

once.”

“Well, I guess when I tell your motha how you're layin' hold, she won't

think it's the same pusson,” said her father, proudly.

“But it is; I haven't changed a bit.”

“You ha'n't changed for the wohse, anyway.”

“Didn't I always try to do what I had to?”

“I guess you did, Clem.”

“Well, then!”

Mr. Orson, after a decent hesitation, consented to perform the ceremony.

It took place in a parlor of the hotel, according to the law of New

York, which facilitates marriage so greatly in all respects that it is

strange any one in the State should remain single. He had then a luxury

of choice between attaching himself to the bridal couple as far as Ohio

on his journey home to Michigan, or to Claxon who was going to take the

boat for Boston the next day on his way to Middlemount. He decided

for Claxon, since he could then see Mrs. Lander's lawyer at once, and

arrange with him for getting out of the vice-consul's hands the money

which he was holding for an authoritative demand. He accepted without

open reproach the handsome fee which the elder Hinkle gave him for his

services, and even went so far as to say, “If your son should ever be

blest with a return to health, he has got a helpmeet such as there are

very few of.” He then admonished the young couple, in whatever trials

life should have in store for them, to be resigned, and always to be

prepared for the worst. When he came later to take leave of them, he was

apparently not equal to the task of fitly acknowledging the return which

Hinkle made him of all the money remaining to Clementina out of the sum

last given her by Mrs. Lander, but he hid any disappointment he might

have suffered, and with a brief, “Thank you,” put it in his pocket.

Hinkle told Clementina of the apathetic behavior of Mr. Orson; he added

with a laugh like his old self, “It's the best that he doesn't seem

prepared for.”

“Yes,” she assented. “He wasn't very chee'ful. But I presume that he

meant well. It must be a trial for him to find out that Mrs. Landa

wasn't rich, after all.”

It was apparently never a trial to her. She went to Ohio with her

husband and took up her life on the farm, where it was wisely judged

that he had the best chance of working out of the wreck of his health

and strength. There was often the promise and always the hope of this,

and their love knew no doubt of the future. Her sisters-in-law delighted

in all her strangeness and difference, while they petted her as

something not to be separated from him in their petting of their

brother; to his mother she was the darling which her youngest had never

ceased to be; Clementina once went so far as to say to him that if she

was ever anything she would like to be a Moravian.

The question of religion was always related in their minds to the

question of Gregory, to whom they did justice in their trust of each

other. It was Hinkle himself who reasoned out that if Gregory was

narrow, his narrowness was of his conscience and not of his heart or his

mind. She respected the memory of her first lover; but it was as if he

were dead, now, as well as her young dream of him, and she read with a

curious sense of remoteness, a paragraph which her husband found in the

religious intelligence of his Sunday paper, announcing the marriage of

the Rev. Frank Gregory to a lady described as having been a frequent

and bountiful contributor to the foreign missions. She was apparently

a widow, and they conjectured that she was older than he. His departure

for his chosen field of missionary labor in China formed part of the

news communicated by the rather exulting paragraph.

“Well, that is all right,” said Clementina's husband. “He is a good man,

and he is where he can do nothing but good. I am glad I needn't feel

sorry for him, any more.”

Clementina's father must have given such a report of Hinkle and his

family, that they felt easy at home in leaving her to the lot she had

chosen. When Claxon parted from her, he talked of coming out with her

mother to see her that fall; but it was more than a year before they got

round to it. They did not come till after the birth of her little girl,

and her father then humorously allowed that perhaps they would not have

got round to it at all if something of the kind had not happened. The

Hinkles and her father and mother liked one another, so much that in the

first glow of his enthusiasm Claxon talked of settling down in Ohio, and

the older Hinkle drove him about to look at some places that were for

sale. But it ended in his saying one day that he missed the hills, and

he did not believe that he would know enough to come in when it rained

if he did not see old Middlemount with his nightcap on first. His wife

and he started home with the impatience of their years, rather earlier

than they had meant to go, and they were silent for a little while after

they left the flag-station where Hinkle and Clementina had put them

aboard their train.

“Well?” said Claxon, at last.

“Well?” echoed his wife, and then she did not speak for a little while

longer. At last she asked,

“D'he look that way when you fust see him in New Yo'k?”

Claxon gave his honesty time to get the better of his optimism. Even

then he answered evasively, “He doos look pootty slim.”

“The way I cypher it out,” said his wife, “he no business to let her

marry him, if he wa'n't goin' to get well. It was throwin' of herself

away, as you may say.”

“I don't know about that,” said Claxon, as if the point had occurred to

him, too, and had been already argued in his mind. “I guess they must

'a' had it out, there in New York before they got married--or she had.

I don't believe but what he expected to get well, right away. It's the

kind of a thing that lingas along, and lingas along. As fah fo'th as

Clem went, I guess there wa'n't any let about it. I guess she'd made

up her mind from the staht, and she was goin' to have him if she had to

hold him on his feet to do it. Look he'a! What would you done?”

“Oh, I presume we're all fools!” said Mrs. Claxon, impatient of a sex

not always so frank with itself. “But that don't excuse him.”

“I don't say it doos,” her husband admitted. “But I presume he was

expectin' to get well right away, then. And I don't believe,” he added,

energetically, “but what he will, yet. As I undastand, there ain't

anything ogganic about him. It's just this he'e nuvvous prostration,

resultin' from shock, his docta tells me; and he'll wo'k out of that all

right.”

They said no more, and Mrs. Claxon did not recur to any phase of the

situation till she undid the lunch which the Hinkles had put up for

them, and laid out on the napkin in her lap the portions of cold ham and

cold chicken, the buttered biscuit, and the little pot of apple-butter,

with the large bottle of cold coffee. Then she sighed, “They live well.”

“Yes,” said her husband, glad of any concession, “and they ah' good

folks. And Clem's as happy as a bud with 'em, you can see that.”

“Oh, she was always happy enough, if that's all you want. I presume

she was happy with that hectorin' old thing that fooled her out of her

money.”

“I ha'n't ever regretted that money, Rebecca,” said Claxon, stiffly,

almost sternly, “and I guess you a'n't, eitha.”

“I don't say I have,” retorted Mrs. Claxon. “But I don't like to be made

a fool of. I presume,” she added, remotely, but not so irrelevantly,

“Clem could ha' got 'most anybody, ova the'a.”

“Well,” said Claxon, taking refuge in the joke, “I shouldn't want her to

marry a crowned head, myself.”

It was Clementina who drove the clay-bank colt away from the station

after the train had passed out of sight. Her husband sat beside her, and

let her take the reins from his nerveless grasp; and when they got into

the shelter of the piece of woods that the road passed through he put up

his hands to his face, and broke into sobs. She allowed him to weep on,

though she kept saying, “Geo'ge, Geo'ge,” softly, and stroking his knee

with the hand next him. When his sobbing stopped, she said, “I guess

they've had a pleasant visit; but I'm glad we'a together again.” He took

up her hand and kissed the back of it, and then clutched it hard, but

did not speak. “It's strange,” she went on, “how I used to be home-sick

for father and motha”--she had sometimes lost her Yankee accent in her

association with his people, and spoke with their Western burr, but she

found it in moments of deeper feeling--“when I was there in Europe, and

now I'm glad to have them go. I don't want anybody to be between us; and

I want to go back to just the way we we'e befo'e they came. It's been

a strain on you, and now you must throw it all off and rest, and get up

your strength. One thing, I could see that fatha noticed the gain you

had made since he saw you in New Yo'k. He spoke about it to me the fust

thing, and he feels just the way I do about it. He don't want you to

hurry and get well, but take it slowly, and not excite yourself. He

believes in your gleaner, and he knows all about machinery. He says the

patent makes it puffectly safe, and you can take your own time about

pushing it; it's su'a to go. And motha liked you. She's not one to talk

a great deal--she always leaves that to father and me--but she's got

deep feelings, and she just worshipped the baby! I neva saw her take a

child in her ahms before; but she seemed to want to hold the baby all

the time.” She stopped, and then added, tenderly, “Now, I know what you

ah' thinking about, Geo'ge, and I don't want you to think about it any

more. If you do, I shall give up.”

They had come to a bad piece of road where a slough of thick mud forced

the wagon-way over the stumps of a turnout in the woods. “You had better

let me have the reins, Clementina,” he said. He drove home over the

yellow leaves of the hickories and the crimson leaves of the maples,

that heavy with the morning dew, fell slanting through the still air;

and on the way he began to sing; his singing made her heart ache. His

father came out to put up the colt for him; and Hinkle would not have

his help.

He unhitched the colt himself, while his father trembled by with bent

knees; he clapped the colt on the haunch and started him through the

pasture-bars with a gay shout, and then put his arm round Clementina's

waist, and walked her into the kitchen amidst the grins of his mother

and sisters, who said he ought to be ashamed.

The winter passed, and in the spring he was not so well as he had been

in the fall. It was the out-door life which was best for him, and he

picked up again in the summer. When another autumn came, it was thought

best for him not to risk the confinement of another winter in the North.

The prolongation of the summer in the South would complete his cure, and

Clementina took her baby and went with him to Florida. He was very well,

there, and courageous letters came to Middlemount and Ohio, boasting of

the gains he had made. One day toward spring he came in languid from the

damp, unnatural heat, and the next day he had a fever, which the doctor

would not, in a resort absolutely free from malaria, pronounce malarial.

After it had once declared itself, in compliance with this reluctance,

a simple fever, Hinkle was delirious, and he never knew Clementina

again for the mother of his child. They were once more at Venice in his

ravings, and he was reasoning with her that Belsky was not drowned.

The mystery of his malady deepened into the mystery of his death. With

that his look of health and youth came back, and as she gazed upon his

gentle face, it wore to her the smile of quaint sweetness that she had

seen it wear the first night it won her fancy at Miss Milray's horse in

Florence.

XXXIX.

Six years after Miss Milray parted with Clementina in Venice she found

herself, towards the close of the summer, at Middlemount. She had

definitely ceased to live in Florence, where she had meant to die, and

had come home to close her eyes. She was in no haste to do this, and

in the meantime she was now at Middlemount with her brother, who had

expressed a wish to revisit the place in memory of Mrs. Milray. It

was the second anniversary of her divorce, which had remained, after a

married life of many vicissitudes, almost the only experience untried in

that relation, and which had been happily accomplished in the courts of

Dacotah, upon grounds that satisfied the facile justice of that State.

Milray had dealt handsomely with his widow, as he unresentfully called

her, and the money he assigned her was of a destiny perhaps as honored

as its origin. She employed it in the negotiation of a second marriage,

in which she redressed the balance of her first by taking a husband

somewhat younger than herself.

Both Milray and his sister had a wish which was much more than a

curiosity to know what had become of Clementina; they had heard that her

husband was dead, and that she had come back to Middlemount; and Miss

Milray was going to the office, the afternoon following their arrival,

to ask the landlord about her, when she was arrested at the door of the

ball-room by a sight that she thought very pretty. At the bottom of the

room, clearly defined against the long windows behind her, stood the

figure of a lady in the middle of the floor. In rows on either side sat

little girls and little boys who left their places one after another,

and turned at the door to make their manners to her. In response to each

obeisance the lady dropped a curtsey, now to this side, now to that,

taking her skirt between her finger tips on either hand and spreading

it delicately, with a certain elegance of movement, and a grace that

was full of poetry, and to Miss Milray, somehow, full of pathos. There

remained to the end a small mite of a girl, who was the last to leave

her place and bow to the lady. She did not quit the room then, like the

others, but advanced toward the lady who came to meet her, and lifted

her and clasped her to her breast with a kind of passion. She walked

down toward the door where Miss Milray stood, gently drifting over the

polished floor, as if still moved by the music that had ceased, and as

she drew near, Miss Milray gave a cry of joy, and ran upon her. “Why,

Clementina!” she screamed, and caught her and the child both in her

arms.

She began to weep, but Clementina smiled instead of weeping, as she

always used to do. She returned Miss Milray's affectionate greeting with

a tenderness as great as her own, but with a sort of authority, such as

sometimes comes to those who have suffered. She quieted the older woman

with her own serenity, and met the torrent of her questions with as many

answers as their rush permitted, when they were both presently in Miss

Milray's room talking in their old way. From time to time Miss Milray

broke from the talk to kiss the little girl, whom she declared to be

Clementina all over again, and then returned to her better behavior with

an effect of shame for her want of self-control, as if Clementina's mood

had abashed her. Sometimes this was almost severe in its quiet; that

was her mother coming to her share in her; but again she was like her

father, full of the sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness, and then Miss

Milray said, “Now you are the old Clementina!”

Upon the whole she listened with few interruptions to the story which

she exacted. It was mainly what we know. After her husband's death

Clementina had gone back to his family for a time, and each year since

she had spent part of the winter with them; but it was very lonesome

for her, and she began to be home-sick for Middlemount. They saw it and

considered it. “They ah' the best people, Miss Milray!” she said, and

her voice, which was firm when she spoke of her husband, broke in the

words of minor feeling. Besides being a little homesick, she ended, she

was not willing to live on there, doing nothing for herself, and so she

had come back.

“And you are here, doing just what you planned when you talked your life

over with me in Venice!”

“Yes, but life isn't eva just what we plan it to be, Miss Milray.”

“Ah, don't I know it!”

Clementina surprised Miss Milray by adding, “In a great many things--I

don't know but in most--it's better. I don't complain of mine--”

“You poor child! You never complained of anything--not even of Mrs.

Lander!”

“But it's different from what I expected; and it's--strange.”

“Yes; life is very strange.”

“I don't mean--losing him. That had to be. I can see, now, that it had

to be almost from the beginning. It seems to me that I knew it had to be

from the fust minute I saw him in New Yo'k; but he didn't, and I am glad

of that. Except when he was getting wohse, he always believed he should

get well; and he was getting well, when he--”

Miss Milray did not violate the pause she made with any question, though

it was apparent that Clementina had something on her mind that she

wished to say, and could hardly say of herself.

She began again, “I was glad through everything that I could live

with him so long. If there is nothing moa, here or anywhe'a, that was

something. But it is strange. Sometimes it doesn't seem as if it had

happened.”

“I think I can understand, Clementina.”

“I feel sometimes as if I hadn't happened myself.” She stopped, with a

patient little sigh, and passed her hand across the child's forehead, in

a mother's fashion, and smoothed her hair from it, bending over to look

down into her face. “We think she has her fatha's eyes,” she said.

“Yes, she has,” Miss Milray assented, noting the upward slant of

the child's eyes, which gave his quaintness to her beauty. “He had

fascinating eyes.”

After a moment Clementina asked, “Do you believe that the looks are all

that ah' left?”

Miss Milray reflected. “I know what you mean. I should say character was

left, and personality--somewhere.”

“I used to feel as if it we'e left here, at fust--as if he must come

back. But that had to go.”

“Yes.”

“Everything seems to go. After a while even the loss of him seemed to

go.”

“Yes, losses go with the rest.”

“That's what I mean by its seeming as if it never any of it happened.

Some things before it are a great deal more real.”

“Little things?”

“Not exactly. But things when I was very young.” Miss Milray did not

know quite what she intended, but she knew that Clementina was feeling

her way to something she wanted to say, and she let her alone. “When it

was all over, and I knew that as long as I lived he would be somewhere

else, I tried to be paht of the wo'ld I was left in. Do you think that

was right?”

“It was wise; and, yes, it was best,” said Miss Milray, and for relief

from the tension which was beginning to tell upon her own nerves, she

asked, “I suppose you know about my poor brother? I'd better tell you to

keep you from asking for Mrs. Milray, though I don't know that it's so

very painful with him. There isn't any Mrs. Milray now,” she added, and

she explained why.

Neither of them cared for Mrs. Milray, and they did not pretend to be

concerned about her, but Clementina said, vaguely, as if in recognition

of Mrs. Milray's latest experiment, “Do you believe in second

marriages?”

Miss Milray laughed, “Well, not that kind exactly.”

“No,” Clementina assented, and she colored a little.

Miss Milray was moved to add, “But if you mean another kind, I don't see

why not. My own mother was married twice.”

“Was she?” Clementina looked relieved and encouraged, but she did not

say any more at once. Then she asked, “Do you know what ever became of

Mr. Belsky?”

“Yes. He's taken his title again, and gone back to live in Russia; he's

made peace with the Czar; I believe.”

“That's nice,” said Clementina; and Miss Milray made bold to ask:

“And what has become of Mr. Gregory?”

Clementina answered, as Miss Milray thought, tentatively and obliquely:

“You know his wife died.”

“No, I never knew that she lived.”

“Yes. They went out to China, and she died the'a.”

“And is he there yet? But of course! He could never have given up being

a missionary.”

“Well,” said Clementina, “he isn't in China. His health gave out, and he

had to come home. He's in Middlemount Centa.”

Miss Milray suppressed the “Oh!” that all but broke from her lips.

“Preaching to the heathen, there?” she temporized.

“To the summa folks,” Clementina explained, innocent of satire. “They

have got a Union Chapel the'a, now, and Mr. Gregory has been preaching

all summa.” There seemed nothing more that Miss Milray could prompt her

to say, but it was not quite with surprise that she heard Clementina

continue, as if it were part of the explanation, and followed from the

fact she had stated, “He wants me to marry him.”

Miss Milray tried to emulate her calm in asking, “And shall you?”

“I don't know. I told him I would see; he only asked me last night.

It would be kind of natural. He was the fust. You may think it is

strange--”

Miss Milray, in the superstition of her old-maidenhood concerning love,

really thought it cold-blooded and shocking; but she said, “Oh, no.”

Clementina resumed: “And he says that if it was right for me to stop

caring for him when I did, it is right now for me to ca'e for him again,

where the'e's no one to be hu't by it. Do you think it is?”

“Yes; why not?” Miss Milray was forced to the admission against what she

believed the finer feelings of her nature.

Clementina sighed, “I suppose he's right. I always thought he was good.

Women don't seem to belong very much to themselves in this wo'ld, do

they?”

“No, they seem to belong to the men, either because they want the men,

or the men want them; it comes to the same thing. I suppose you don't

wish me to advise you, my dear?”

“No. I presume it's something I've got to think out for myself.”

“But I think he's good, too. I ought to say that much, for I didn't

always stand his friend with you. If Mr. Gregory has any fault it's

being too scrupulous.”

“You mean, about that old trouble--our not believing just the same?”

Miss Milray meant something much more temperamental than that, but she

allowed Clementina to limit her meaning, and Clementina went on. “He's

changed all round now. He thinks it's all in the life. He says that in

China they couldn't understand what he believed, but they could what he

lived. And he knows I neva could be very religious.”

It was in Miss Milray's heart to protest, “Clementina, I think you

are one of the most religious persons I ever knew,” but she forebore,

because the praise seemed to her an invasion of Clementina's dignity.

She merely said, “Well, I am glad he is one of those who grow more

liberal as they grow older. That is a good sign for your happiness. But

I dare say it's more of his happiness you think.”

“Oh, I should like to be happy, too. There would be no sense in it if I

wasn't.”

“No, certainly not.”

“Miss Milray,” said Clementina, with a kind of abruptness, “do you eva

hear anything from Dr. Welwright?”

“No! Why?” Miss Milray fastened her gaze vividly upon her.

“Oh, nothing. He wanted me to promise him, there in Venice, too.”

“I didn't know it.”

“Yes. But--I couldn't, then. And now--he's written to me. He wants me to

let him come ova, and see me.”

“And--and will you?” asked Miss Milray, rather breathlessly.

“I don't know. I don't know as I'd ought. I should like to see him,

so as to be puffectly su'a. But if I let him come, and then didn't--It

wouldn't be right! I always felt as if I'd ought to have seen then

that he ca'ed for me, and stopped him; but I didn't. No, I didn't,” she

repeated, nervously. “I respected him, and I liked him; but I neva”--She

stopped, and then she asked, “What do you think I'd ought to do, Miss

Milray?”

Miss Milray hesitated. She was thinking superficially that she had never

heard Clementina say had ought, so much, if ever before. Interiorly she

was recurring to a sense of something like all this before, and to the

feeling which she had then that Clementina was really cold-blooded and

self-seeking. But she remembered that in her former decision, Clementina

had finally acted from her heart and her conscience, and she rose from

her suspicion with a rebound. She dismissed as unworthy of Clementina

any theory which did not account for an ideal of scrupulous and

unselfish justice in her.

“That is something that nobody can say but yourself, Clementina,” she

answered, gravely.

“Yes,” sighed Clementina, “I presume that is so.”

She rose, and took her little girl from Miss Milray's knee. “Say

good-bye,” she bade, looking tenderly down at her.

Miss Milray expected the child to put up her lips to be kissed. But she

let go her mother's hand, took her tiny skirts between her finger-tips,

and dropped a curtsey.

“You little witch!” cried Miss Milray. “I want a hug,” and she crushed

her to her breast, while the child twisted her face round and anxiously

questioned her mother's for her approval. “Tell her it's all right,

Clementina!” cried Miss Milray. “When she's as old as you were in

Florence, I'm going to make you give her to me.”

“Ah' you going back to Florence?” asked Clementina, provisionally.

“Oh, no! You can't go back to anything. That's what makes New York so

impossible. I think we shall go to Los Angeles.”

XL.

On her way home Clementina met a man walking swiftly forward. A sort of

impassioned abstraction expressed itself in his gait and bearing. They

had both entered the shadow of the deep pine woods that flanked the way

on either side, and the fallen needles helped with the velvety summer

dust of the roadway to hush their steps from each other. She saw him far

off, but he was not aware of her till she was quite near him.

“Oh!” he said, with a start. “You filled my mind so full that I couldn't

have believed you were anywhere outside of it. I was coming to get

you--I was coming to get my answer.”

Gregory had grown distinctly older. Sickness and hardship had left

traces in his wasted face, but the full beard he wore helped to give him

an undue look of age.

“I don't know,” said Clementina, slowly, “as I've got an answa fo' you,

Mr. Gregory--yet.”

“No answer is better that the one I am afraid of!”

“Oh, I'm not so sure of that,” she said, with gentle perplexity, as

she stood, holding the hand of her little girl, who stared shyly at the

intense face of the man before her.

“I am,” he retorted. “I have been thinking it all over, Clementina. I've

tried not to think selfishly about it, but I can't pretend that my wish

isn't selfish. It is! I want you for myself, and because I've always

wanted you, and not for any other reason. I never cared for any one but

you in the way I cared for you, and--”

“Oh!” she grieved. “I never ca'ed at all for you after I saw him.”

“I know it must be shocking to you; I haven't told you with any wretched

hope that it would commend me to you!”

“I don't say it was so very bad,” said Clementina, reflectively, “if it

was something you couldn't help.”

“It was something I couldn't help. Perhaps I didn't try.”

“Did--she know it?”

“She knew it from the first; I told her before we were married.”

Clementina drew back a little, insensibly pulling her child with her. “I

don't believe I exactly like it.”

“I knew you wouldn't! If I could have thought you would, I hope I

shouldn't have wished--and feared--so much to tell you.”

“Oh, I know you always wanted to do what you believed was right, Mr.

Gregory,” she answered. “But I haven't quite thought it out yet. You

mustn't hurry me.”

“No, no! Heaven forbid.” He stood aside to let her pass.

“I was just going home,” she added.

“May I go with you?”

“Yes, if you want to. I don't know but you betta; we might as well; I

want to talk with you. Don't you think it's something we ought to talk

about--sensibly?”

“Why, of course! And I shall try to be guided by you; I should always

submit to be ruled by you, if--”

“That's not what I mean, exactly. I don't want to do the ruling. You

don't undastand me.”

“I'm afraid I don't,” he assented, humbly.

“If you did, you wouldn't say that--so.” He did not venture to make any

answer, and they walked on without speaking, till she asked, “Did you

know that Miss Milray was at the Middlemount?”

“Miss Milray! Of Florence?”

“With her brother. I didn't see him; Mrs. Milray is not he'a; they ah'

divo'ced. Miss Milray used to be very nice to me in Florence. She isn't

going back there any moa. She says you can't go back to anything. Do you

think we can?”

She had left moments between her incoherent sentences where he might

interrupt her if he would, but he waited for her question. “I hoped we

might; but perhaps--”

“No, no. We couldn't. We couldn't go back to that night when you threw

the slippas into the riva, no' to that time in Florence when we gave up,

no' to that day in Venice when I had to tell you that I ca'ed moa fo'

some one else. Don't you see?”

“Yes, I see,” he said, in quick revulsion from the hope he had

expressed. “The past is full of the pain and shame of my errors!”

“I don't want to go back to what's past, eitha,” she reasoned, without

gainsaying him.

She stopped again, as if that were all, and he asked, “Then is that my

answer?”

“I don't believe that even in the otha wo'ld we shall want to go back to

the past, much, do you?” she pursued, thoughtfully.

Once Gregory would have answered confidently; he even now checked an

impulse to do so. “I don't know,” he owned, meekly.

“I do like you, Mr. Gregory!” she relented, as if touched by his

meekness, to the confession. “You know I do--moa than I ever expected to

like anybody again. But it's not because I used to like you, or because

I think you always acted nicely. I think it was cruel of you, if you

ca'ed for me, to let me believe you didn't, afta that fust time. I can't

eva think it wasn't, no matta why you did it.”

“It was atrocious. I can see that now.”

“I say it, because I shouldn't eva wish to say it again. I know that

all the time you we'e betta than what you did, and I blame myself a good

deal moa fo' not knowing when you came to Florence that I had begun to

ca'e fo' some one else. But I did wait till I could see you again, so

as to be su'a which I ca'ed for the most. I tried to be fai'a, before I

told you that I wanted to be free. That is all,” she said, gently, and

Gregory perceived that the word was left definitely to him.

He could not take it till he had disciplined himself to accept

unmurmuringly his sentence as he understood it. “At any rate,” he began,

“I can thank you for rating my motive above my conduct.”

“Oh,” she said. “I don't think either of us acted very well. I didn't

know till aftawa'ds that I was glad to have you give up, the way you did

in Florence. I was--bewild'ed. But I ought to have known, and I want

you to undastand everything, now. I don't ca'e for you because I used

to when I was almost a child, and I shouldn't want you to ca'e for me

eitha, because you did then. That's why I wish you had neva felt that

you had always ca'ed fo' me.”

“Yes,” said Gregory. He let fall his head in despair.

“That is what I mean,” said Clementina. “If we ah' going to begin

togetha, now, it's got to be as if we had neva begun before. And you

mustn't think, or say, or look as if the'e had been anything in oua

lives but ouaselves. Will you? Do you promise?” She stopped, and put her

hand on his breast, and pushed against it with a nervous vehemence.

“No!” he said. “I don't promise, for I couldn't keep my promise. What

you ask is impossible. The past is part of us; it can't be ignored any

more than it can be destroyed. If we take each other, it must be for all

that we have been as well as all that we are. If we haven't the courage

for that we must part.”

He dropped the little one's hand which he had been holding, and moved a

few steps aside. “Don't!” she said. “They'll think I've made you,” and

he took the child's hand again.

They had emerged from the shadow of the woods, and come in sight of her

father's house. Claxon was standing coatless before the door in full

enjoyment of the late afternoon air; his wife beside him, at sight of

Gregory, quelled a natural impulse to run round the corner of the house

from the presence of strangers.

“I wonda what they'a sayin',” she fretted.

“It looks some as if she was sayin' yes,” said Claxon, with an

impersonal enjoyment of his conjecture. “I guess she saw he was bound

not to take no for an answa.”

“I don't know as I should like it very much,” his wife relucted. “Clem's

doin' very well, as it is. She no need to marry again.”

“Oh, I guess it a'n't that altogetha. He's a good man.” Claxon mused

a moment upon the figures which had begun to advance again, with the

little one between them, and then gave way in a burst of paternal pride,

“And I don't know as I should blame him so very much for wantin' Clem.

She always did want to be of moa use--But I guess she likes him too.”

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

All in all to each other

Chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own

Composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor

Didn't reason about their beliefs, but only argued

Dull, cold self-absorption

Everything seems to go

Gift of waiting for things to happen

Going on of things had long ceased to bring pleasure

He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's a do-everything

He's so resting

Hopeful apathy in his face

I'm moa used to havin' the things brought to me

Inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving

It's the best that he doesn't seem prepared for

Kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full

Led a life of public seclusion

Life alone is credible to the young

Luxury of helplessness

Morbid egotism

Motives lie nearer the surface than most people commonly pretend

New England necessity of blaming some one

No object in life except to deprive it of all object

One time where one may choose safest what one likes best

Only man I ever saw who would know how to break the fall

Perverse reluctance to find out where they were

Provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness

Real artistocracy is above social prejudice

Scant sleep of an elderly man

Seldom talked, but there came times when he would'nt even listen

Singleness of a nature that was all pose

Submitted, as people always do with the trials of others

Sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness

Thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids

Tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction

Unaware that she was a selfish or foolish person

Under a fire of conjecture and asseveration

Understood when I've said something that doesn't mean anything

We change whether we ought, or not

Weak in his double letters

When she's really sick, she's better

Willing that she should do herself a wrong

Wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted

Women don't seem to belong very much to themselves

You can't go back to anything

You were not afraid, and you were not bold; you were just right

You've got a light-haired voice

You've got a light-haired voice

End of Project Gutenberg's Ragged Lady, Complete, by William Dean Howells