k these towels this morning?"

Sylvie sat marking the towels, and Desire passed to and fro,
gathering things which were to go to Neighbor Street in the
afternoon.

"Do you see," she said, stopping behind Sylvie a while after, and
putting her fingers upon her hair with a caressing little
touch,--"the sun has got round from the east to the south. It shines
into this window now. And you have been keeping quiet, just doing
your own little work of the moment. The world is all alive, and
changing. Things are working--away up in the heavens--for us all.
When people don't know which way to turn, it is very often good not
to turn at all; if they are _driven_, they do know. Wait till you
are driven, or see; you will be shown, one way or the other. It is
almost always when things are all blocked up and impossible, that a
happening comes. It has to. A dead block can't last, any more than a
vacuum. If you are sure you are looking and ready, that is all you
need. God is turning the world round all the time."

Desire did not say one word about the ninety-eight dollars which lay
in one of the locked drawers of her writing desk, in precisely the
shape in which every two or three weeks she had let Sylvie put the
money into her hands. There would be a right time for that. She
would force nothing. Sylvie would come near enough, yet, for that
perfect understanding in which those bits of stamped paper would
cease to be terrible between their hands, _either_ way.

CHAPTER XXX.

NEIGHBOR STREET AND GRAVES ALLEY.

Rodney Sherrett had heard of the Argenters' losses by the fire; what
would have been the good of his correspondence with Aunt Euphrasia,
and how would she have expected to keep him pacified up in
Arlesbury, if he could not get, regularly, all she knew? Of course
he ferreted out of her, likewise, the rest of the business, as fast
as she heard it.

"It's really a dreadful thing to be so confided in, all round!" she
said to Desire Ledwith, when they had been talking one morning.
"People don't know half the ways in which everything that gets
poured into my mind concerns everything else. As an intelligent
human being, to say nothing of sympathies, I _can't_ act as if they
weren't there. I feel like a kind of Judas with a bag of secrets to
keep, and playing the traitor with every one of them!"

"What a nice world it would be if there were only plenty more just
such Judases to carry the bags!" Desire answered, buttoning on