ust of each
other. It was Hinkle himself who reasoned out that if Gregory was
narrow, his narrowness was of his conscience and not of his heart or his
mind. She respected the memory of her first lover; but it was as if he
were dead, now, as well as her young dream of him, and she read with a
curious sense of remoteness, a paragraph which her husband found in the
religious intelligence of his Sunday paper, announcing the marriage of
the Rev. Frank Gregory to a lady described as having been a frequent
and bountiful contributor to the foreign missions. She was apparently
a widow, and they conjectured that she was older than he. His departure
for his chosen field of missionary labor in China formed part of 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 n