t, 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
somewha