“And—and will you?” asked Miss Milray, rather breathlessly.
“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.”