red 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 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