houses in the country; and that is not little for people who
have nothing wherewith to buy smiles and pay for invitations. Clare had
more than once met women of her mother's age and older, who had looked
at her rather thoughtfully and longer than had seemed quite natural,
saying very quietly that her father had been "a great friend of theirs."
But those were not the women whom her mother liked best, and Clare
sometimes wondered whether the little grey cloud in her memory, which
represented her father, might not be there to hide away something more
human than an ideal. Her mother spoke of him, sometimes gravely,
sometimes with a far-away smile, but never tenderly. The smile did not
mean much, Clare thought. People often spoke of dead people with a sort
of faint look of uncertain beatitude--the same which many think
appropriate to the singing of hymns. The absence of anything like
tenderness meant more. The gravity was only natural and decent.

"Your father was a brave man," Mrs. Bowring sometimes said. "Your father
was very handsome," she would say. "He was very quick-tempered," she
perhaps added.

But that was all. Clare had a friend whose husband had died young and
suddenly, and her friend's heart was broken. She did not speak as Mrs.
Bowring did. When the latter said that her past life seemed to be
written in a foreign language, Clare did not understand, but she knew
that the something of which the translation was lost, as it were,
belonged to her father. She always felt an instinctive desire to defend
him, and to make her mother feel more sympathy for his memory. Yet, at
the same time, she loved her mother in such a way as made her feel that
if there had been any trouble, her father must have been in the wrong.
Then she was quite sure that she did not understand, and she held her
tongue, and smiled vaguely, and waited a moment before she went on with
her work.

Besides, she was not at all inclined to argue anything at present. She
had been ill, and her mother was worn out with taking care of her, and
they had come to Amalfi to get quite well and strong again in the air of
the southern spring. They had settled themselves for a couple of months
in the queer hotel, which was once a monastery, perched high up under
the still higher overhanging rocks, far above the beach and the busy
little town; and now, in the May afternoon, they sat side by side under
the trellis of vines on the terraced walk, their faces turned sout