stories about it, though all the story there is, is that of Mr. Flavius Josephus Browne, the man of the brick enterprise, who built it in this odd way, and probably imagined a story for himself that he never lived out in it, because his money and his business came to an end.  How strange it is that work doesn’t always make money, and that it takes so much combination to make anything worth while!  I wonder that even men know just what to do.  And as for women,—­why, when they take to elbowing men out, what will it all come to?

“I have written on, until I have written off some of my heavy feelings that I began with.  If I could only talk to you, dear Miss Euphrasia, I think they would all go.  But I will not trouble you any longer now; I am quite ashamed of the great packet this will make when it is folded up.  But you told me to let you know all about myself, and I can’t help minding such an injunction as that!

“Yours gratefully and affectionately always,
“SYLVIE ARGENTER.”

Miss Kirkbright had not read this straight through without a pause.  Two or three times she had let her hands drop to her lap with the letter in them, and sat thinking.  When she came to what Sylvie said about her “laughing to know how she had been saving,” Miss Euphrasia stopped, not to laugh, but to wipe tears from her eyes.

“The poor, dear, brave little soul!” she said to herself.  “And that blessed Mrs. Jeffords,—­to let her think she is earning her board with ironing sheets, perhaps, and washing dishes!  Km!”

That last unspellable sound was a half choke and half chuckle, that Miss Euphrasia surprised herself in making out of the sudden, mixed impulse to sob, and laugh, and to catch somebody in her arms and kiss that wasn’t there.

“If I were an angel, I suppose I could wait,” she went on saying to herself after that.  “But even for them, it must be hard work some times.  And so,—­how the great Reasons Why flash upon one out of one’s own little experience!—­of that wonderful, blessed Day, when all shall be made right, the angels in heaven know not, neither the Son, but the Father only!  The Lord cannot even trust the pure human that is in Himself to dwell, separately, upon that End which is to be, but may not be yet!”

I do not suppose anything whatever could come into Miss Euphrasia’s life, or touch her with its circumstance, that she did not straightway read in it the wider truth beyond the letter.  She was a Swedenborgian, not after Swedenborg, but by the living gift itself.  Her insight was no separate thing, taken up and used now and then, of a purpose.  It was as different from that as eyes are from spectacles.  She could not help her little sermons.  They preached themselves to her and in her, continually.  So, if we go along with her, we must take her with her interpretations.  Some friend said of her once, that she was a life with marginal notes; and the notes were the larger part of it.