“No, no,” he entreated, “that’s the best of it.  But I want to do the worrying for you even when you’re with her.  Will you let me?”

“Why, if you want to so very much.”

“Then it’s settled,” he said, dismissing the subject.

But she recurred to it with a lingering compunction.

“I presume that I don’t remember how sick she is because I’ve neva been sick at all, myself.”

“Well,” he returned, “You needn’t be sorry for that altogether.  There are worse things than being well, though sick people don’t always think so.  I’ve wasted a good deal of time the other way, though I’ve reformed, now.”

They went on to talk about themselves; sometimes they talked about others, in excursions which were more or less perfunctory, and were merely in the way of illustration or instance.  She got so far in one of these as to speak of her family, and he seemed to understand them.  He asked about them all, and he said he believed in her father’s unworldly theory of life.  He asked her if they thought at home that she was like her father, and he added, as if it followed, “I’m the worldling of my family.  I was the youngest child, and the only boy in a flock of girls.  That always spoils a boy.”

“Are you spoiled?” she asked.

“Well, I’m afraid they’d be surprised if I didn’t come to grief somehow—­all but—­mother; she expects I’ll be kept from harm.”

“Is she religious?”

“Yes, she’s a Moravian.  Did you ever hear of them?” Clementina shook her head.  “They’re something, like the Quakers, and something like the Methodists.  They don’t believe in war; but they have bishops.”

“And do you belong to her church?”

“No,” said the young man.  “I wish I did, for her sake.  I don’t belong to any.  Do you?”

“No, I go to the Episcopal, at home.  Perhaps I shall belong sometime.  But I think that is something everyone must do for themselves.”  He looked a little alarmed at the note of severity in her voice, and she explained.  “I mean that if you try to be religious for anything besides religion, it isn’t being religious;—­and no one else has any right to ask you to be.”

“Oh, that’s what I believe, too,” he said, with comic relief.  “I didn’t know but I’d been trying to convert you without knowing it.”  They both laughed, and were then rather seriously silent.

He asked, after a moment, in a fresh beginning, “Have you heard from Miss Milray since you left Florence?”

“Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you?  She’s coming here in June.”

“Well, she won’t have the pleasure of seeing me, then.  I’m going the last of May.”

“I thought you were going to stay a month!” she protested.

“That will be a month; and more, too.”

“So it will,” she owned.

“I’m glad it doesn’t seem any longer-say a year—­Miss Clementina!”

“Oh, not at all,” she returned.  “Miss Milray’s brother and his wife are coming with her.  They’ve been in Egypt.”