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?"

"Oh, I presume we're all fools!"