ices, and
even went so far as to say, "If your son should ever be blest with a
return to health, he has got a helpmeet such as there are very few of."
He then admonished the young couple, in whatever trials life should have
in store for them, to be resigned, and always to be prepared for the
worst. When he came later to take leave of them, he was apparently not
equal to the task of fitly acknowledging the return which Hinkle made him
of all the money remaining to Clementina out of the sum last given her by
Mrs. Lander, but he hid any disappointment he might have suffered, and
with a brief, "Thank you," put it in his pocket.

Hinkle told Clementina of the apathetic behavior of Mr. Orson; he added
with a laugh like his old self, "It's the best that he doesn't seem
prepared for."

"Yes," she assented. "He wasn't very chee'ful. But I presume that he
meant well. It must be a trial for him to find out that Mrs. Landa wasn't
rich, after all."

It was apparently never a trial to her. She went to Ohio with her husband
and took up her life on the farm, where it was wisely judged that he had
the best chance of working out of the wreck of his health and strength.
There was often the promise and always the hope of this, and their love
knew no doubt of the future. Her sisters-in-law delighted in all her
strangeness and difference, while they petted her as something not to be
separated from him in their petting of their brother; to his mother she
was the darling which her youngest had never ceased to be; Clementina
once went so far as to say to him that if she was ever anything she would
like to be a Moravian.

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