Glastonbury seemed very dull to me when I first came back from Seabay. I roamed about the fields in search of consolation for something I had lost, but could find little or none. It was a relief when the term began.
I had determined to work hard. I did work hard, and this term I got my remove into the sixth, and was under Craven, but it seemed that the moments of tastelessness, as Mr. Cholmeley had once said, were more frequent as the autumn grew more damp and decaying and the moments of hopeful delight more rare: and all the while no letter from Rayne.
At last, late on in September that is, the letter came. She was sorry not to have written to me quite within the month, as she had said she would, but her father ('father' simply, as she wrote) had been very ill, and she could not settle down to write me a long letter about some things she had been thinking about, and she did not care to send to me 'a scribble.' They had returned to Paris for a few weeks to see a doctor there about father, and then back again to Switzerland, Thun, which he was very fond of. What she had been thinking about was her neglect of religious study.—I can remember that some one had brought this home to her, and that she was reading the New Testament in the original, and a general idea of mine that she had a fit of religious seriousness upon her that puzzled me in a vague sort of way. I didn't think about religion myself. I never had thought about it, somehow.
I answered her at some length, giving a summary of the authors I had read and the impressions I had formed therefrom, with occasional allusions to events or things that interested me, afterwards noticing to myself that I really wasn't thinking very much about her in connection with what I had written. I directed the letter, as she told me, to a poste restante, somewhere in Italy, where they were going shortly.
Late in October her second letter came. I give it entire.
'My dear Bertram,—It is a wet and tempestuous afternoon, and therefore I consider it a fitting occasion to answer your long and with difficulty decipherable epistle. Yesterday
was one of the hottest days I remember here, my thermometer