think a little chicken broth would do you good, Mr. Osson? I don't
believe but what it would."

A wistful gleam came into the preacher's eyes. "It might," he admitted,
and then she knew what must be his malady. She sent Maddalena to a
trattoria for the soup, and she did not leave him, even after she had
seen its effect upon him. It was not hard to persuade him that he had
better come home with her; and she had him there, tucked away with his
few poor belongings, in the most comfortable room the padrone could
imagine, when the vice-consul came in the evening.

"He says he thinks he can go, now," she ended, when she had told the
vice-consul. "And I know he can. It wasn't anything but poor living."

"It looks more like no living," said the vice-consul. "Why didn't the
old fool let some one know that he was short of money?" He went on with
a partial transfer of his contempt of the preacher to her, "I suppose if
he'd been sick instead of hungry, you'd have waited over till the next
steamer for him."

She cast down her eyes. "I don't know what you'll think of me. I should
have been sorry for him, and I should have wanted to stay." She lifted
her eyes and looked the vice-consul defiantly in the face. "But he
hadn't the fust claim on me, and I should have gone--I couldn't, have
helped it!--I should have gone, if he had been dying!"

"Well, you've got more horse-sense," said the vice-consul, "than any ten
men I ever saw," and he testified his admiration of her by putting his
arms round her, where she stood before him, and kissing her. "Don't you
mind," he explained. "If my youngest girl had lived, she would have been
about your age."

"Oh, it's all right, Mr. Bennam," said Clementina.

When the time came for them to leave Venice, Mr. Orson was even eager
to go. The vice-consul would have gone with them in contempt of the
official responsibilities which he felt to be such a thankless burden,
but there was really no need of his going, and he and Clementina treated
the question with the matter-of-fact impartiality which they liked in
each other. He saw her off at the station where Maddalena had come to
take the train for Florence in token of her devotion to the signorina,
whom she would not outstay in Venice. She wept long and loud upon
Clementina's neck, so that even Clementina was once moved to put her
handkerchief to her tearless eyes.

At the last moment she had a question which she referred to the vice
consul. "Shoul