She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not; but when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them.  She wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his place.  She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were not so pleasant.  Another year passed, and towards the end of the season Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went over to the hotel to soften her refusal.  She explained that her mother had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell said:  Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of dependence for her mother.  “You ah’ going on seventeen this year, ain’t you?”

“I was nineteen the last day of August,” said Clementina, and Mrs. Atwell sighed, and said, How the time did fly.

It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were going to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could, for the autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of custom for.

“I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead,” she added, and at Clementina’s look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, “Mm! died the thutteenth day of August.  I presumed somehow you’d know it, though you didn’t see a great deal of ’em, come to think of it.  I guess he was a good man; too good for her, I guess,” she concluded, in the New England necessity of blaming some one.  “She sent us the papah.”

There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard winter, but it was not this that made Clementina’s father set to work finishing his house.  His turning business was well started, now, and he had got together money enough to pay for the work.  He had lately enlarged the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for the tops of them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of the farm and village houses in a wide stretch of country.  They sold more steadily than the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases and platters which had once been the output of his lathe; after the first season the interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the gate posts and the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.

Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and he was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so.  After some attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers, but he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at critical moments.  They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at the side of the house.  Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden roadway, something about urns.  Claxon would answer, without troubling himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.