presently in Miss Milray’s room talking in their old way.  From time to time Miss Milray broke from the talk to kiss the little girl, whom she declared to be Clementina all over again, and then returned to her better behavior with an effect of shame for her want of self-control, as if Clementina’s mood had abashed her.  Sometimes this was almost severe in its quiet; that was her mother coming to her share in her; but again she was like her father, full of the sunny gayety 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 eyes.”