Neither Boston, nor the world, is “finished” yet.  There may be many a burning and rebuilding, first.  Meanwhile, we will tell what we can see.

And that word sends me back to Bel herself, of whom this present seeing and telling can read and recite no further.

Are you dissatisfied to leave her here?  Is it a pity, you think, that the little glimmer of romance in Leicester Place meant nothing, after all?  There are blind turns in the labyrinth of life.  Would you have our Bel lost in a blind turn?

The right and the wrong settled it, as they settle all things.  The right and the wrong are the reins with which we are guided into the very best, sooner or later; yes,—­sooner and later.  If we will go God’s way, we shall have manifold more in this present world, and in the world to come life everlasting.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

WHAT NOBODY COULD HELP.

Mr. and Mrs. Kirkbright went away to New York on the afternoon of their marriage.

Miss Euphrasia went up to Brickfields.  Sylvie Argenter was to follow her on Thursday.  It had been settled that she should remain with Desire, who, with her husband, would reach home on Saturday.

It was a sweet, pleasant spring day, when Sylvie Argenter, with some last boxes and packages, took the northward train for Tillington.

She was going to a life of use and service.  She was going into a home; a home that not only made a fitting place for her in it, and was perfect in itself, but that, with noble plan and enlargement, found way to reach its safety and benediction, and the contagion of its spirit, over souls that would turn toward it, come under its rule, and receive from it, as their only shelter and salvation; over a neighborhood that was to be a planting of Hope,—­a heavenly feudality.

Sylvie’s own dreams of a possible future for herself were only purple lights upon a far horizon.

It seemed a very great way off, any bringing to speech and result the mute, infrequent signs of what was yet the very real, secret strength and joy and hope of her girl’s heart.

She had a thought of Rodney Sherrett that she was sure she had a right to.  That was all she wanted, yet.  Of course, Rodney was not ready to marry; he was too young; he was not much older than she was, and that was very young for a man.  She did not even think about it; she recognized the whole position without thinking.

She remembered vividly the little way-station in Middlesex, where he had bought the ferns, that day in last October; she thought of him as the train ran slowly alongside the platform at East Keaton.  She wondered if he would not sometimes come up for a Sunday; to spend it with his uncle and his Aunt Euphrasia.  It was a secret gladness to her that she was to be where he partly, and very affectionately, belonged.  She was sure she should see him, now and then.  Her life looked pleasant to her, its current setting alongside one current, certainly, of his.