this time from
Denver City. Not a word of business; a pure woman's letter, as Mrs.
Farron Saftleigh chose to rank a woman's thought and sympathy;
nothing practical, nothing that had to do with coarse topics of bond
and scrip; taking the common essentials of life for granted,
referring to the inignorable catastrophe of the fire as a grand
elemental phenomenon and spectacle, and soaring easily away and
beyond all fact and literalness, into the tender vague, the rare
empyrean.

Mrs. Argenter read it over and over, and wished plaintively that she
could go out to Denver, and be near her friend. She should like a
new place; and such appreciation and affection were not be met with
everywhere, or often in a lifetime.

Sylvie read the letter once, and had great necessity of
self-restraint not to toss it contemptuously and indignantly into
the fire.

She made up her mind to one thing, at least; that if, at the end of
the six months, nothing were heard from Mr. Saftleigh himself, she
would write to him upon her own responsibility, and demand some
intelligence as to her mother's investments in the Latterend and
Donnowhair road, the reason why a dividend was not forthcoming, and
a statement in regard to actual or probable sales of land, which he
had given them reason to expect would before that time have been
made.

One afternoon she had gone down with Desire and Hazel among the
shops; Desire and the Ripwinkleys were very busy about Christmas;
they had ever so many "notches to fill in" in their rather mixed up
and mutable memoranda. Sylvie only accompanied them as far as Winter
Street corner, where she had to buy some peach-colored double-zephyr
for her mother; then she bade them good-by, saying that two were bad
enough dragging each other about with their two shopping lists, but
that a third would extinguish fatally both time and space and taking
her little parcel in her hand, and wondering how many more such she
could ever buy, she returned home over the long hill alone. So it
happened that on reaching Greenley Street, she had quite to herself
a surprise and pleasure which she found there.

She went straight to the gray room first of all.

Mrs. Argenter was asleep on the low sofa near the fire, her crochet
stripe-work fallen by her side upon the carpet, her book laid face
down with open leaves upon the cushion.

Sylvie passed softly into her own chamber, took off her outside
things, and returned with careful steps thro