Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, “Why, if you would, Mrs. Atwell,” and kept on to her room.

Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself very soon, and Clementina’s earlier departure simplified the question of getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs. Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.

The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her.  The landlord put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own hand.  There was something in the child’s bearing, her dignity and her amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in earnest, the deference paid to age and state.

She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went.  She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had not expected him to do so.  About the third week of September she heard that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.

She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked after the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his quest of stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of summer folks in dress and in canes.  The winter came, and she read many books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector’s library.  He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any one than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their details.  She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus of their testimony that she had really been made love to, and not so very much too soon, at her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines were not much older.  The terms of Gregory’s declaration and of its withdrawal were mystifying, but not more mystifying than many such things, and from what happened in the novels she read, the affair might be trusted to come out all right of itself in time.  She was rather thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother asked her what was the matter with her.  “Oh, I guess I’m getting old, motha,” she said, and turned the question off.  She would not have minded telling her mother about Gregory, but it would not have been the custom; and her mother would have worried, and would have blamed him.  Clementina could have more easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as she knew fathers never were trusted with anything of the kind.  She would have been willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs. Richling; but the moment never came when she could