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."

After a moment Clementina asked, "Do you believe that the looks are all
that ah' left?"

Miss Milray reflected. "I know what you mean. I should say character was
left, and personality--somewhere."

"I used to feel as if it we'e left here, at fust--as if he must come
back. But that had to go."

"Yes."

"Everything seems to go. After a while even the loss of him seemed to
go."

"Yes, losses go with the rest."

"That's what I mean by its seeming as if it never any of it happened.
Some things before it are a great deal more real."

"Little things?"

"Not exactly. But things when I was very young." Miss Milray did not know
quite what she intended, but she knew that Clementina was feeling