“She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don’t believe but what you could do it, Clem.  You’re a good reader, as good as I want to hear, and while you may say that you don’t put in a great deal of elocution, I guess you can read full well enough.  All he wants is just something to keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with otha folks.  Well, she is moa their own age.  I d’know as the’s any hahm in her.  And my foot’s so much betta, now, that I don’t need you the whole while, any moa.”

“Did you speak to her about me?” asked the girl.

“Well, I told her I’d tell you.  I couldn’t say how you’d like.”

“Oh, I guess I should like,” said Clementina, with her eyes shining.  “But—­I should have to ask motha.”

“I don’t believe but what your motha’d be willin’,” said Mrs. Atwell.  “You just go down and see her about it.”

The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good conscience that she shared with the spectators.  She kissed him with lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to death for him.  She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not trust to any sign from him.

Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away, to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by means of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the down-stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina opened the book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr. Milray.

The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point, to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians were.  He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any consciousness of being read to.  He kept the smile on his delicate face which had come there when his wife said at parting, “I don’t believe I should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was,” and he held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in listening to her final charges.  It was a fine head, still well covered with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin, which had not been lost in the change from youth to age.  One could never have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed