For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure of Fanny as a go-between that she could not write to her.  And then she wrote less effusively, and in her letter she asked point-blank, “Have you seen Mr. Snooks?” Fanny’s letter was unexpectedly satisfactory.  “I have seen Mr. Snooks,” she wrote, and having once named him she kept on about him; it was all Snooks—­Snooks this and Snooks that.  He was to give a public lecture, said Fanny, among other things.  Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the first glow of gratification, still found this letter a little unsatisfactory.  Fanny did not report Mr. Snooks as saying anything about Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking a little white and worn, as he ought to have been doing.  And behold! before she had replied, came a second letter from Fanny on the same theme, quite a gushing letter, and covering six sheets with her loose feminine hand.

And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that Miss Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time.  Fanny’s natural femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear traditions of the Training College; she was one of those she-creatures born to make all her m’s and n’s and u’s and r’s and e’s alike, and to leave her o’s and a’s open and her i’s undotted.  So that it was only after an elaborate comparison of word with word that Miss Winchelsea felt assured Mr. Snooks was not really “Mr. Snooks” at all!  In Fanny’s first letter of gush he was Mr.  “Snooks,” in her second the spelling was changed to Mr.  “Senoks.”  Miss Winchelsea’s hand positively trembled as she turned the sheet over—­it meant so much to her.  For it had already begun to seem to her that even the name of Mrs. Snooks might be avoided at too great a price, and suddenly—­this possibility!  She turned over the six sheets, all dappled with that critical name, and everywhere the first letter had the form of an e!  For a time she walked the room with a hand pressed upon her heart.

She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter of inquiry that should be at once discreet and effectual; weighing, too, what action she should take after the answer came.  She was resolved that if this altered spelling was anything more than a quaint fancy of Fanny’s, she would write forthwith to Mr. Snooks.  She had now reached a stage when the minor refinements of behaviour disappear.  Her excuse remained uninvented, but she had the subject of her letter clear in her mind, even to the hint that “circumstances in my life have changed very greatly since we talked together.”  But she never gave that hint.  There came a third letter from that fitful correspondent Fanny.  The first line proclaimed her “the happiest girl alive.”