Her whole being had set homeward in a tide that already seemed to drift the vessel from its moorings. "What--what do you mean?" she gasped.
"I didn't know," he returned, "but that in view of the circumstances--all the circumstances--you might be intending to defer your departure to some later steamer."
"No, no, no ! I must go, now. I couldn't wait a day, an hour, a minute after the first chance of going. You don't know what you are saying!
He might die if I told him I was not coming; and then what should I do?"
This was what Clementina said to herself; but what she said to Mr. Orson, with an inspiration from her terror at his suggestion was, "Don't you 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."