“I shall speak to Mr. Thayne about it,” said Desire.  “And now, dear, if you could just mark 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 her Astrachan collar, and picking up her muff to go.

Whereupon five minutes after, the amiable traitress was seated at her writing-desk replying to Rodney’s last imperative inquiry, and telling him, under protest, as something he could not possibly help, or have to do with, the further misfortune of Sylvie and her mother.