her own dinners could
be anything,--anywhere. She must get a cheap rooms where some tidy
lodging woman would do what was needful; and that would take,--oh,
dear! she _couldn't_ say less than six or seven dollars a week, and
where were food and clothes to come from? At any rate, she must
begin before their present resources were utterly exhausted, or what
would become of her mother's cream, and fruit, and beef-tea?

Mingled with all her troubled and often-reviewed calculations, would
intrude now and then the thought,--shouldn't she have to be willing
to wear out and grow ugly, with hard work and insufficient
nourishing? And she would have so liked to keep fresh and pretty for
the time that might have come!

In the days when these things were keeping her anxious, the winter
wreath was also slowly turning dry.

She found herself hemmed in and headed at every turn by the pitiless
hedge and ditch of circumstance, at which girls and women in our
time have to chafe and wait; and from which there seems to be no way
out. Yet there are ways out from this, as from all things. One
way--the way of thorough womanly home-helpfulness--was not clear to
her; there are many to whom it is not clear. Yet if those to whom it
is, or might be, would take it,--if those who might give it, in many
forms, _would give_,--who knows what relief and loosening would come
to others in the hard jostle and press?

There is another way out of all puzzle and perplexity and hardness;
it is the Lord's special way for each one, that we cannot foresee,
and that we never know until it comes. Then we discern that there
has never been impossibility; that all things are open before his
eyes; and that there is no temptation,--no trying of us,--to which
He will not provide some end or escape.

In the first week of January, Sylvie acted upon her resolve of
writing to Mr. Farron Saftleigh. She asked brief and direct
questions; told him that she was obliged to request an answer
without the least delay; and begged that he would render them a
clear statement of all their affairs. She reminded him that he had
_told_ them that he would be responsible for their receiving a
dividend of at least four per cent, at the end of the six months.

Mr. Farron Saftleigh "told" people a great many things in his
genial, exhilarating business talks, which he was a great deal too
wise ever to put down on paper.

Sylvie waited ten days; a fortnight; three weeks; no answer came.
Mr