Mrs.
Leslie's letter insisted, regretfully but strongly, was
that the next remittance, which they hoped to be able to
send in a week or two, would necessarily be the last. It
would be as large as they could make it; at all events
it would amply cover her passage and railway expenses to
Sparta, and of course she would sail as soon as it reached
her. It was an elaborate letter, written in phrases which
Mrs. Leslie thought she evolved, but probably remembered
from a long and comprehensive course of fiction as
appropriate to the occasion, and Elfrida read between
the lines with some impatience how largely their trouble
was softened to her mother by the consideration that it
would inevitably bring her back to them. "We can bear it
well if we bear it together," wrote Mrs. Bell. "You have
always been our brave daughter, and your young courage
will be invaluable to us now. Your talents will be our
flowers by the way-side. We shall take the keenest possible
delight in watching them expand, as, even under the cloud
of financial adversity, we know they will."

"Dear over-confident parent," Elfrida reflected grimly
at this point, "I must yet prove that I have any."

Along with the situation she studied elaborately the
third page of the _Sparta Sentinel_. When it had arrived,
months before, containing the best part of a long letter
describing Paris, which she had written to her mother in
the first freshness of her delighted impressions, she
had glanced over it with half-amused annoyance at the
foolish parental pride that suggested printing it. She
was already too remote from the life of Sparta to care
very much one way or another, but such feeling as she
had was of that sort. And the compliments from the
minister, from various members of the Browning Club, from
the editor himself, that filtered through her mother's
letters during the next two or three weeks, made her
shrug with their absolute irrelevance to the only praise
that could thrill her and the only purpose she held dear.
Even now, when the printed lines contained the significance
of a possible resource, she did not give so much as a
thought to the flattering opinion of Sparta as her mother
had conveyed it to her. She read them over and over,
relying desperately on her own critical sense and her
knowledge of what the Paris correspondent of the _Daily
Dial_ thought of her chances in that direction. He, Frank
Parke, had told her once that if her brush failed she
had