th's, for the Read-and-Talk.

You may say Jerusalem is not taken yet, after all; there are plenty
of "hard places," where girls like Kate Sencerbox and Bel Bree would
not stay a week; there are hundreds of women, heads of houses, who
would not be bothered with so much superfluous intelligence,--with
refinements so nearly on a level with their own.

Granted: but it is the first steps that cost. Do you not think--do
you not _know_--that a real good, planted in the world,--in social
living,--_must_ spread, from point to point where the circumstance
is ready, where it is the "next thing?" If you do not believe this,
you do not practically believe in the kingdom ever coming at all.

There is a rotation of crops in living and in communities, as well
as in the order of vegetation of secret seeds that lie in the
earth's bosom.

We shall not always be rank with noisome weeds and thistles; here
and there, the better thought is swelling toward the germination;
the cotyledons of a fairer hope are rising through the mould.

CHAPTER XXIX.

WINTERGREEN.

To tell of what has been happening with Sylvie Argenter's thread of
our story, we must go back some weeks and pages to the time just
after the great fire.

As it was with the spread of the conflagration itself, so it proved
also with the results,--of loss, and deprivation, and change. Many
seemed at first to stand safely away out on the margin, mere
lookers-on, to whom presently, with more or less direct advance, the
great red wave of ruin reached, touching, scorching, consuming.

It was a week afterward that Sylvie Argenter learned that the
Manufacturers' Insurance Company, in which her mother had, at her
persuasion, invested the little actual, tangible remnant of her
property, had found itself swallowed up in its enormous debt; must
reorganize, begin again, with fresh capital and new stockholders.

They had nothing to reinvest. The money in the Continental Bank
would just about last through the winter, paying the seven dollars a
week for Mrs. Argenter, and spending as nearly nothing for other
things as possible. Unless something came from Mr. Farron Saftleigh
before the spring, that would be the end.

Thus far they had heard nothing from these zealous friends since
they had parted from them at Sharon, except one sentimental letter
from Mrs. Farron Saftleigh to Mrs. Argenter, written from Newport in
September.

Early in December, another just such missive came