ty of self-forgetfulness, and then Miss
Milray said, "Now you are the old Clementina!"

Upon the whole she listened with few interruptions to the story which
she exacted. It was mainly what we know. After her husband's death
Clementina had gone back to his family for a time, and each year since
she had spent part of the winter with them; but it was very lonesome
for her, and she began to be home-sick for Middlemount. They saw it and
considered it. "They ah' the best people, Miss Milray!" she said, and
her voice, which was firm when she spoke of her husband, broke in the
words of minor feeling. Besides being a little homesick, she ended, she
was not willing to live on there, doing nothing for herself, and so she
had come back.

"And you are here, doing just what you planned when you talked your life
over with me in Venice!"

"Yes, but life isn't eva just what we plan it to be, Miss Milray."

"Ah, don't I know it!"

Clementina surprised Miss Milray by adding, "In a great many things--I
don't know but in most--it's better. I don't complain of mine--"

"You poor child! You never complained of anything--not even of Mrs.
Lander!"

"But it's different from what I expected; and it's--strange."

"Yes; life is very strange."

"I don't mean-losing him. That had to be. I can see, now, that it had
to be almost from the beginning. It seems to me that I knew it had to be
from the fust minute I saw him in New Yo'k; but he didn't, and I am glad
of that. Except when he was getting wohse, he always believed he should
get well; and he was getting well, when he--"

Miss Milray did not violate the pause she made with any question, though
it was apparent that Clementina had something on her mind that she
wished to say, and could hardly say of herself.

She began again, "I was glad through everything that I could live
with him so long. If there is nothing moa, here or anywhe'a, that was
something. But it is strange. Sometimes it doesn't seem as if it had
happened."

"I think I can understand, Clementina."

"I feel sometimes as if I hadn't happened myself." She stopped, with a
patient little sigh, and passed her hand across the child's forehead, in
a mother's fashion, and smoothed her hair from it, bending over to look
down into her face. "We think she has her fatha's eyes," she said.

"Yes, she has," Miss Milray assented, noting the upward slant of
the child's eyes, which gave his quaintness to her beauty. "He had
fascinating