ut 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 betty not keep this
up any Tonga; I don't believe much in surprises, 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