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 somewhat younger than herself.

Both Milray and his sister had a wish which was much more than a curiosity to know what had become of Clementina; they had heard that her husband was dead, and that she had come back to Middlemount; and Miss Milray was going to the office, the afternoon following their arrival, to ask the landlord about her, when she was arrested at the door of the ball-room by a sight that she thought very pretty.  At the bottom of the room, clearly defined against the long windows behind her, stood the figure of a lady in the middle of the floor.  In rows on either side sat little girls and little boys who left their places one after another, and turned at the door to make their manners to her.  In response to each obeisance the lady dropped a curtsey, now to this side, now to that, taking her skirt between her finger tips on either hand and spreading it delicately, with a certain elegance of movement, and a grace that was full of poetry, and to Miss Milray, somehow, full of pathos.  There remained to the end a small mite of a girl, who was the last to leave her place and bow to the lady.  She did not quit the room then, like the others, but advanced toward the lady who came to meet her, and lifted her and clasped her to her breast with a kind of passion.  She walked down toward the door where Miss Milray stood, gently drifting over the polished floor, as if still moved by the music that had ceased, and as she drew near, Miss Milray gave a cry of joy, and ran upon her.  “Why, Clementina!” she screamed, and caught her and the child both in her arms.

She began to weep, but Clementina smiled instead of weeping, as she always used to do.  She returned Miss Milray’s affectionate greeting with a tenderness as great as her own, but with a sort of authority, such as sometimes comes to those who have suffered.  She quieted the older woman with her own serenity, and met the torrent of her questions with as many answers as their rush permitted, when they were both