“In the spring he is to go to Europe for the firm.”

“He will like that,” said Marjorie, finding her voice.

“He is somebody to be depended on.  But there is the tea-bell, and my little traveller is hungry, for she would not eat on the train and I tempted her with fruit and crackers.”

“Aunt Prue, I like it here.  May I see up stairs, too?”

“You must see the supper table first.  And then Marjorie may show you everything while I write to Uncle John, to tell him that our little bird has found her nest.”

Marjorie gave up her place that night in the wide, old-fashioned mahogany bedstead beside Miss Prudence and betook herself to the room that opened out of Miss Prudence’s, a room with handsome furniture in ash, the prevailing tint of the pretty things being her favorite shade of light blue.

“That is a maiden’s room,” Miss Prudence had said; “and when Prue has a maiden’s room it shall be in rose.”

Marjorie was not jealous, as she had feared she might be, of the little creature who nestled close to Miss Prudence; she felt that Miss Prudence was being comforted in the child.  She was too happy to sleep that night.  In the years afterward she did not leave Hollis out of her prayers, but she never once thought to pray that he might be brought back again to be her friend.  Her prayer for him had been answered and with that she was well content.

XVII.

MORRIS.

“What I aspired to be comforts me.”—­Browning.

It was late one evening in November; Prue had kissed them both good-night and ran laughing up the broad staircase to bed; Miss Prudence had finished her evening’s work and evening’s pleasure, and was now sitting opposite Marjorie, near the register in the back parlor.  A round table had been rolled up between them upon which the shaded, bronze lamp was burning, gas not having yet been introduced into old-fashioned Maple Street.  The table was somewhat littered and in confusion, Prue’s stereoscope was there with the new views of the Yosemite at which she had been looking that evening and asking Aunt Prue numerous questions, among which was “Shall we go and see them some day?  Shall we go everywhere some day?” Aunt Prue had satisfied her with “Perhaps so, darling,” and then had fallen silently to wondering why she and Prue might not travel some day, a year in Europe had always been one of her postponed intentions, and, by and by, how her child would enjoy it.  Marjorie’s books and writing desk were on the table also, for she had studied mental philosophy and chemistry after she had copied her composition and written a long letter to her mother.  Short letters were as truly an impossibility to Marjorie as short addresses are to some public speeches; still Marjorie always stopped when she found she had nothing to say.  To her mother, school and Miss Prudence and Prue’s sayings and doings were an endless