and the American standpoint will be the
very thing for you."

"Perhaps so, perhaps so," he admitted. "At any rate, this is a handsome
offer, and most kindly made, Celia. It's a great compliment. I didn't
suppose they valued me so much."

"Of course they valued you, and they will be very glad to get you. I
call it merely letting the historic material ripen in your mind, or else
I shouldn't let you accept. And I shall be glad to go home, Owen, on
Lily's account. The child is getting no good here: she's drooping."

"Drooping?"

"Yes. Don't you see how she mopes about?"

"I'm afraid--that--I have--noticed."

He was going to ask why she was drooping; but he could not. He said,
recurring to the letter of the overseers, "So Patmos is a city."

"Of course it is by this time," said his wife, "with all that
prosperity!"

Now that they were determined to go, their little preparations for
return were soon made; and a week after Elmore had written to accept the
offer of the overseers, they were ready to follow his letter home. Their
decision was a blow to Hoskins under which he visibly suffered; and they
did not realize till then in what fond and affectionate friendship he
held them. He now frankly spent his whole time with them; he
disconsolately helped them pack, and he did all that a consul can do to
secure free entry for some objects of Venice that they wished to get in
without payment of duties at New York.

He said a dozen times, "I don't know what I _will_ do when you're gone";
and toward the last he alarmed them for his own interests by beginning
to say, "Well, I don't see but what I will have to go along."

The last night but one Lily felt it her duty to talk to him very
seriously about his future and what he owed to it. She told him that he
must stay in Italy till he could bring home something that would honor
the great, precious, suffering country for which he had fought so nobly,
and which they all loved. She made the tears come into her eyes as she
spoke, and when she said that she should always be proud to be
associated with one of his works, Hoskins's voice was quite husky in
replying: "Is that the way you feel about it?" He went away promising to
remain at least till he finished his bas-relief of Westward, and his
figure of the Pacific Slope; and the next morning he sent around by a
_facchino_ a note to Lily.

She ran it through in the presence of the Elmores, before whom she
received it, and then, with