He looked at George's sister as if for authority to speak further, and Clementina looked at her, too, while George's father nervously moistened his smiling lips with the tip of his tongue, and let his twinkling eyes rest upon Clementina's face.
"Is he at the hotel?" she asked.
"Yes," said his sister, monosyllabic for once.
"I knew it," said Clementina, and she was only half aware of the fullness with which his sister now explained how he wanted to come so much that the doctor thought he had better, but that they had made him promise he would not try to meet her at the steamer, lest it should be too great a trial of his strength.
"Yes," Clementina assented, when the story came to an end and was beginning over again.
She had an inexplicable moment when she stood before her lover in the room where they left her to meet him alone. She faltered and he waited constrained by her constraint.
"Is it all a mistake, Clementina?" he asked, with a piteous smile.
"No, no!"
"Am I so much changed?"
"No; you are looking better than I expected."
"And you are not sorry-for anything?"
"No, I am-- Perhaps I have thought of you too much! It seems so strange."
"I understand," he answered. "We have been like spirits to each other, and now we find that we are alive and on the earth like other people; and we are not used to it."
"It must be something like that."
"But if it's something else--if you have the least regret,--if you would rather "--He stopped, and they remained looking at each other a moment.
Then she turned her head, and glanced out of the window, as if something there had caught her sight.
"It's a very pleasant view, isn't it?" she said; and she lifted her hands to her head, and took off her hat, with an effect of having got home after absence, to stay.