Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other pockets.  “No,” he said, “I haven’t got it with me.  I must have left it in my room.  I just received a letter from Frank—­Mr. Gregory, you know, I always call him Frank—­and I thought I had it with me.  He was asking about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said.  But I’ll find it upstairs.  He’s out of college, now, and he’s begun his studies in the divinity school.  He’s at Andover.  I don’t know what to make of Frank, oftentimes,” the clerk continued, confidentially.  “I tell him he’s a kind of a survival, in religion; he’s so aesthetic.”  It seemed to Fane that he had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask Clementina what the word was.  He went on to say, “He’s a grand good fellow, Frank is, but he don’t make enough allowance for human nature.  He’s more like one of those old fashioned orthodox.  I go in for having a good time, so long as you don’t do anybody else any hurt.”

He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning over the desk, and saying severely, “My mail, if you please,” and Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs. Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid’s help was withdrawn.

Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said about Middlemount filling her mind.  It must have had something to do with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to forget.  She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in it, to know why he really took them back.  She had never blamed him, and she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him.  But she had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation, and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it must be something like a message, although it could not be anything direct.  No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his.  There was scarcely more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane’s place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory had said.  But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only wished to talk about himself.  He wished to analyze himself, to tell her what sort of person he was.  He dealt impartially with the subject; he did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.