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 voluntarily confide in her, though she was a great deal with her that winter.  She was Mrs. Richling’s lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the rector’s wife took under her care.  She helped her get up entertainments of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall.  They contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a dull one.  She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the help used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and practise together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would rather dance than eat, any time.  She was never sad, but so much dignity got into her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of feeling put down by her.