She stopped and she saw that she need not say more.

In the days that followed before the time that Hinkle had fixed to leave Venice, he tried to come as he had been coming, to see Mrs. Lander, but he evaded her when she wished to send him out with Clementina.  His quaintness had a heartache in it for her; and he was boyishly simple in his failure to hide his suffering.  He had no explicit right to suffer, for he had asked nothing and been denied nothing, but perhaps for this reason she suffered the more keenly for him.

A senseless resentment against Gregory for spoiling their happiness crept into her heart; and she wished to show Hinkle how much she valued his friendship at any risk and any cost.  When this led her too far she took herself to task with a severity which hurt him too.  In the midst of the impulses on which she acted, there were times when she had a confused longing to appeal to him for counsel as to how she ought to behave toward him.

There was no one else whom she could appeal to.  Mrs. Lander, after her first warning, had not spoken of him again, though Clementina could feel in the grimness with which she regarded her variable treatment of him that she was silently hoarding up a sum of inculpation which would crush her under its weight when it should fall upon her.  She seemed to be growing constantly better, now, and as the interval since her last attack widened behind her, she began to indulge her appetite with a recklessness which Clementina, in a sense of her own unworthiness, was helpless to deal with.  When she ventured to ask her once whether she ought to eat of something that was very unwholesome for her, Mrs. Lander answered that she had taken her case into her own hands, now, for she knew more about it than all the doctors.  She would thank Clementina not to bother about her; she added that she was at least not hurting anybody but herself, and she hoped Clementina would always be able to say as much.

Clementina wished that Hinkle would go away, but not before she had righted herself with him, and he lingered his month out, and seemed as little able to go as she to let him.  She had often to be cheerful for both, when she found it too much to be cheerful for herself.  In his absence she feigned free and open talks with him, and explained everything, and experienced a kind of ghostly comfort in his imagined approval and forgiveness, but in his presence, nothing really happened except the alternation of her kindness and unkindness, in which she was too kind and then too unkind.

The morning of the’ day he was at last to leave Venice, he came to say good bye.  He did not ask for Mrs. Lander, when the girl received him, and he did not give himself time to lose courage before he began, “Miss Clementina, I don’t know whether I ought to speak to you after what I understood you to mean about Mr. Gregory.”  He looked steadfastly at her but she did not answer, and he went on.  “There’s just one chance in a million, though, that I didn’t understand you rightly, and I’ve made up my mind that I want to take that chance.  May I?” She tried to speak, but she could not.  “If I was wrong—­if there was nothing between you and him—­could there ever be anything between you and me?”