e wouldn't have thought of
it," she said, in a final self-reproach, "if I hadn't put it into his
head."

"Well, then, I'm not sorry you put it into his head," cried Miss Milray.
"Clementina, may I say what I think of Mr. Gregory's performance?"

"Why, certainly, Miss Milray!"

I think he's not merely a gloomy little bigot, but a very hard-hearted
little wretch, and I'm glad you're rid of him. No, stop! Let me go on!
You said I might! she persisted, at a protest which imparted itself from
Clementina's restive hands. "It was selfish and cruel of him to let you
believe that he had forgotten you. It doesn't make it right now, when an
accident has forced him to tell you that he cared for you all along."

"Why, do you look at it that way, Miss Milray? If he was doing it on my
account?"

"He may think he was doing it on your account, but I think he was doing
it on his own. In such a thing as that, a man is bound by his mistakes,
if he has made any. He can't go back of them by simply ignoring them. It
didn't make it the same for you when he decided for your sake that he
would act as if he had never spoken to you."

"I presume he thought that it would come right, sometime," Clementina
urged. "I did."

"Yes, that was very well for you, but it wasn't at all well for him. He
behaved cruelly; there's no other word for it."

"I don't believe he meant to be cruel, Miss Milray," said Clementina.

"You're not sorry you've broken with him?" demanded Miss Milray,
severely, and she let go of Clementina's hands.

"I shouldn't want him to think I hadn't been fai'a."

"I don't understand what you mean by not being fair," said Miss Milray,
after a study of the girl's eyes.

"I mean," Clementina explained, "that if I let him think the religion was
all the'e was, it wouldn't have been fai'a."

"Why, weren't you sincere about that?"

"Of cou'se I was!" returned the girl, almost indignantly. "But if the'e
was anything else, I ought to have told him that, too; and I couldn't."

"Then you can't tell me, of course?" Miss Milray rose in a little pique.

"Perhaps some day I will," the girl entreated. "And perhaps that was
all."

Miss Milray laughed. "Well, if that was enough to end it, I'm satisfied,
and I'll let you keep your mystery--if it is one--till we meet in Venice;
I shall be there early in June. Good bye, dear, and say good bye to Mrs.
Lander for me."

XXVIII.

Dr. Welwright got his patient a lodging on the Grand