The question of religion was always related in their minds to the question of Gregory, to whom they did justice in their trust of each other.  It was Hinkle himself who reasoned out that if Gregory was narrow, his narrowness was of his conscience and not of his heart or his mind.  She respected the memory of her first lover; but it was as if he were dead, now, as well as her young dream of him, and she read with a curious sense of remoteness, a paragraph which her husband found in the religious intelligence of his Sunday paper, announcing the marriage of the Rev. Frank Gregory to a lady described as having been a frequent and bountiful contributor to the foreign missions.  She was apparently a widow, and they conjectured that she was older than he.  His departure for his chosen field of missionary labor in China formed part of the news communicated by the rather exulting paragraph.

“Well, that is all right,” said Clementina’s husband.  “He is a good man, and he is where he can do nothing but good.  I am glad I needn’t feel sorry for him, any more.”

Clementina’s father must have given such a report of Hinkle and his family, that they felt easy at home in leaving her to the lot she had chosen.  When Claxon parted from her, he talked of coming out with her mother to see her that fall; but it was more than a year before they got round to it.  They did not come till after the birth of her little girl, and her father then humorously allowed that perhaps they would not have got round to it at all if something of the kind had not happened.  The Hinkles and her father and mother liked one another, so much that in the first glow of his enthusiasm Claxon talked of settling down in Ohio, and the older Hinkle drove him about to look at some places that were for sale.  But it ended in his saying one day that he missed the hills, and he did not believe that he would know enough to come in when it rained if he did not see old Middlemount with his nightcap on first.  His wife and he started home with the impatience of their years, rather earlier than they had meant to go, and they were silent for a little while after they left the flag-station where Hinkle and Clementina had put them aboard their train.

“Well?” said Claxon, at last.

“Well?” echoed his wife, and then she did not speak for a little while longer.  At last she asked,

“D’he look that way when you fust see him in New Yo’k?”

Claxon gave his honesty time to get the better of his optimism.  Even then he answered evasively, “He doos look pootty slim.”

“The way I cypher it out,” said his wife, “he no business to let her marry him, if he wa’n’t goin’ to get well.  It was throwin’ of herself away, as you may say.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Claxon, as if the point had occurred to him, too, and had been already argued in his mind.  “I guess they must ‘a’ had it out, there in New York before they got married—­or she had.  I don’t believe but what he expected to get well, right away.  It’s the kind of a thing that lingas along, and lingas along.  As fah fo’th as Clem went, I guess there wa’n’t any let about it.  I guess she’d made up her mind from the staht, and she was goin’ to have him if she had to hold him on his feet to do it.  Look he’a!  W hat would you done?”