But Miss Euphrasia found a postscript, presently, to Sylvie’s letter, written hurriedly on the other side of the last leaf; as if she had made haste, before she should lose courage and change her mind about saying it:—­

“Do you think it would be possible to find any sort of place in Boston where I could do something to help pay, this winter,—­and will you try for me?  I could sew, or do little things about a house, or read or write for somebody.  I could help in a nursery, or teach, some hours in a day,—­hours when mother likes to be quiet; and she would not know.”

This was essential.  “Mother must not know.”

The finding of this postscript drove out of Miss Euphrasia’s mind another thought that had suddenly come into it as she turned the letter over in her fingers.  It was some minutes before she went back to it; minutes in which she was quite absorbed with simple suggestions and peradventures in Sylvie’s behalf.

But—­“Brickfield Farms?  Sandon?  Josephus Browne.”  When had she heard those names before?  What hopeless piece of property was it she had heard her brother-in-law speak of long ago,—­somewhere down East,—­where there were old kilns and clay-pits?  Something that had come into or passed through his hands for a debt?

“There is a great tangling of links here.  What are they shaken into my fingers for, I wonder?  What is there here to be tied, or to be unraveled?”

For she believed firmly, always, that things did not happen in a jumble, however jumbled they might seem.  Though she could scarcely keep two thoughts together of the many crowded ones that had come to her, one upon another, this strange morning, she was sure the Lord knew all about it, and that He had not sent them upon her in any real confusion.  She knew that there was no precipitance—­no inconsequence—­with Him.

“They are threads picked out for some work that He will do,” she said, as she tucked her brother’s letter into a low, broad basket beside the white and rose and violet wools with which she was at odd minutes crocheting a dainty footspread for an invalid friend, and put the other in her pocket.

“Now I will tie my bonnet on, and go, as I had meant, to see Desire.  That, also, is a piece of this same morning.”

Miss Kirkbright, likewise, watched and learned a story that told and repeated itself as it went along, of a House that was building bit by bit, and of life that lay about it.  Only hers was the house the Lord builds; and the stories of it, and all the sentences of the story, were the things He daily puts together.

CHAPTER XIII.

RACHEL FROKE’S TROUBLE.

Desire was out.  She had gone down to Neighbor Street, to see Luclarion Grapp.

Luclarion had a Home there now; a place where girls and women came and went, and always found a rest and a welcome, to stay a night, or a week, or as long as they needed, provided only, that they entered into the work and spirit of the house while they did stay.