It was now three months since Mrs. Froke had gone away; and letters from her brought the good tidings of successful surgical treatment and a rapid gaining of strength.  She might soon be able to come back.  Sylvie knew that Desire could either continue to contrive work for her a while longer, or spare her to other and more full employment, could such be found.  She watched the “Transcript” list of “Wants,” and wished there might be a “Want” made expressly for her.

How many anxious eyes scan those columns through with a like longing, every night!

If she could get copying to do,—­if she could obtain a situation in the State House, that paradise of well paid female scribes!  If she could even learn to set up type, and be employed in a printing-office?  If there were any chance in a library?  Even work of this sort would take her away from her mother in the daytime; she would have to provide some attendance for her.  She must furnish her room nicely, wherever it was; that she could do from the remnants of their household possessions stored at Dorbury; and her mother must have a delicate little dinner every day.  For breakfast and tea—­she could see to those before and after work; and 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.