She still kept to her habit of writing to him. He stood for something in her life, after all. He was sympathy, kindness, a creature to whom she could turn for fellow-feeling in joy or trouble. He was as interested as she in her powers of mind, in her improvement in languages, her music, and her reading. He wrote more and more hopefully of his own prospects. Always he kept to her commands, and his letters might have been shown to anybody. Yet sometimes there breathed through them a current of feeling which sent a chill foreboding through her. What was she to say when at last he came to claim her promise--she who knew she had nothing to give? Her obligation to him weighed upon her far more heavily than her debt to Mr. Vanston. She became deeply, feverishly anxious to earn her own living. She had a record of every remittance that David had ever sent, that one day she might repay him. Her own complete change of mind encouraged her to hope at times that he might have changed his. It seemed impossible that he, a grown man, in a world full of women, could remain faithful to the memory of a girl whom he had only seen two or three times--a girl of whom he knew so little. What if his heart were as empty towards her as hers towards him? What if he still wrote, still paid, only from a sense of duty, and because he had given his word? One day it was borne in upon her to try in a letter to ascertain his real feeling; and she wrote to him, about six months before her final return to England, after this fashion: "We write to one another, you and I, of what we do, but not of what we think. Yet, since we last met, we must have changed, both of us. At least, I have changed, and it seems foolish to believe that you alone, of all men, have stood still in a world full of movement, of interest, of men, and of women too. "I wonder--I often wonder--and at last my curiosity is so great that I feel I must let it out--what you seriously think, now, of the little comedy of our betrothal in the garden that Sunday evening? "I wonder if you have realized how rash we were to promise any lifelong bond--we who knew nothing of either life or bonds: we who knew nothing of each other, of our respective characters and tastes? "It seems to me impossible that you should not have traveled as far since then, in mind, as you have done in body. And I want to tell you this. If you have come to the conclusion--as it is borne in upon me that you must have--that we were a couple of silly, unreflecting things; please be sure that I, too, am growing up, that I, too, shall soon be able to work for myself, and to repay your goodness to me financially, if not in other ways; and finally, that I, too, see how unreasonable it would be for one of us to hold the other to such a compact in the future." After the dispatch of this letter, she had awaited a reply in some trepidation.