"How came that man to mention
me?" he demanded, abruptly, after a moment's silence.

"Mr. Belsky? It was the first night I saw him, and we were talking about
Americans, and he began to tell me about an American friend of his, who
was very conscientious. I thought it must be you the fust moment," said
Clementina, smiling with an impersonal pleasure in the fact.

"From the conscientiousness?" he asked, in bitter self-irony.

"Why, yes," she returned, simply. "That was what made me think of you.
And the last time when he began to talk about you, I couldn't stop him,
although I knew he had no right to."

"He had no right. But I gave him the power to do it! He meant no harm,
but I enabled him to do all the harm."

"Oh, if he's only alive, now, there is no harm!"

He looked into her eyes with a misgiving from which he burst
impetuously. "Then you do care for me still, after all that I have done
to make you detest me?" He started toward her, but she shrank back.

"I didn't mean that," she hesitated.

"You know that I love you,--that I have always loved you?"

"Yes," she assented. "But you might be sorry again that you had said
it." It sounded like coquetry, but he knew it was not coquetry.

"Never! I've wished to say it again, ever since that night at
Middlemount; I have always felt bound by what I said then, though I took
back my words for your sake. But the promise was always there, and my
life was in it. You believe that?"

"Why, I always believed what you said, Mr. Gregory."

"Well?"

Clementina paused, with her head seriously on one side. "I should want
to think about it before I said anything."

"You are right," he submitted, dropping his outstretched arms to his
side. "I have been thinking only of myself, as usual."

"No," she protested, compassionately. "But doesn't it seem as if we
ought to be su'a, this time? I did ca'e for you then, but I was very
young, and I don't know yet--I thought I had always felt just; as you
did, but now--Don't you think we had both betta wait a little while till
we ah' moa suttain?"

They stood looking at each other, and he said, with a kind of passionate
self-denial, "Yes, think it over for me, too. I will come back, if you
will let me."

"Oh, thank you!" she cried after him, gratefully, as if his forbearance
were the greatest favor.

When he was gone she tried to release herself from the kind of abeyance
in which she seemed to have gone back and been as subject to h