over the banisters, trying to catch a
glimpse of the old woman coming slowly up the stairs far below.

"Yes--one. Don't come for it, I'm coming up. And pray, child, don't hang
over those rickety rails like that."

Miss Bright, or "Brightie," as Hazel Deane had grown affectionately to
call her, is a heavy, strongly-made woman of sixty-three years. She
finds the stairs in this house in Union-square, where she and Hazel
lodge, rather trying; they are many and steep, so she pauses half-way to
recover breath. Looking up she sees Hazel, a white, dark-eyed face, and
a form so slender that even those unsafe rails could hardly give way
under so slight a weight. "More than ever like one of my Cape jasmine
stars," thinks old Brightie. She has always mentally compared the girl
to one of those pure, white stars, which she used so specially to love,
shining on their invisible stems, amidst the dark green leaf-sprays at
her sister's home. Oh, how the poor, lonely old woman's heart had ached
for that country home of her younger days, as she sat wearily at her
business of plain sewing day after day in her attic in Union-square!

And Hazel, looking down, saw her one friend in the world. A ray of
sunlight streamed in through the narrow staircase window on to Miss
Bright. It makes the black cap which covers her whole head, with strings
flying back over her shoulders, look very rusty. It makes her old alpaca
gown, patched and repatched, and the little black silk apron that she
wears, look more than ever shiny. It strikes upon the large,
old-fashioned white pearl buttons down the front of her bodice, and upon
the glasses of her spectacles, till she looks like some strange, black
creature staring all over with big, round eyes. To Hazel's affectionate
mind, however, there is nothing in the least ludicrous in the sight. She
only notes the panting breath, and says, with a touch of impatience in
her anxiety--

"Why will you persist in toiling up and down those horrid stairs,
instead of sending me, Brightie? It is really very unkind of you."

When Brightie has delivered up Hazel's envelope, with its scrawled
direction, she retires into her own room, next door, and shuts herself
in. She is filled with an unwonted excitement, for she holds a second
letter in her hand, and it is her own. The rarest thing it is for her to
have a letter, and the post-mark is "Firdorf," the very same beautiful
country place for which she had pined; there she and Jan