lessly.

"I don't know. I don't know as I'd ought. I should like to see him, so as
to be puffectly su'a. But if I let him come, and then didn't--It wouldn't
be right! I always felt as if I'd ought to have seen then that he ca'ed
for me, and stopped him; but I didn't. No, I didn't," she repeated,
nervously. "I respected him, and I liked him; but I neva"--She stopped,
and then she asked, "What do you think I'd ought to do, Miss Milray?"

Miss Milray hesitated. She was thinking superficially that she had never
heard Clementina say had ought, so much, if ever before. Interiorly she
was recurring to a sense of something like all this before, and to the
feeling which she had then that Clementina was really cold-blooded and
self-seeking. But she remembered that in her former decision, Clementina
had finally acted from her heart and her conscience, and she rose from
her suspicion with a rebound. She dismissed as unworthy of Clementina any
theory which did not account for an ideal of scrupulous and unselfish
justice in her.

"That is something that nobody can say but yourself, Clementina," she
answered, gravely.

"Yes," sighed Clementina, "I presume that is so."

She rose, and took her little girl from Miss Milray's knee. "Say
good-bye," she bade, looking tenderly down at her.

Miss Milray expected the child to put up her lips to be kissed. But she
let go her mother's hand, took her tiny skirts between her finger-tips,
and dropped a curtsey.

"You little witch!" cried Miss Milray. "I want a hug," and she crushed
her to her breast, while the child twisted her face round and anxiously
questioned her mother's for her approval. "Tell her it's all right,
Clementina!" cried Miss Milray. "When she's as old as you were in
Florence, I'm going to make you give her to me."

"Ah' you going back to Florence?" asked Clementina, provisionally.

"Oh, no! You can't go back to anything. That's what makes New York so
impossible. I think we shall go to Los Angeles."

XL.

On her way home Clementina met a man walking swiftly forward. A sort of
impassioned abstraction expressed itself in his gait and bearing. They
had both entered the shadow of the deep pine woods that flanked the way
on either side, and the fallen needles helped with the velvety summer
dust of the roadway to hush their steps from each other. She saw him far
off, but he was not aware of her till she was quite near him.

"Oh!" he said, with a start. "You filled my