’Oh, thanks, dear; mother will give me enough to last me a little while, and I will write to you from Dublin.  You are sure no one sees your letters at Brookfield?’

‘Quite sure; there’s not the slightest danger.’  She did not question the advice she had given, and she felt sure that the Reverend Mother, if a proper appeal were made to her common sense, would consent to conceal the girl’s fault.  Two months would not be long passing, but the expenses of this time would be heavy, and she, Alice, would have to meet them all.  She trembled lest she might fail to do so, and she tried to reckon them up.  It would be impossible to get rooms under a pound a week, and to live, no matter how cheaply, would cost at least two pounds; three pounds a week, four threes are twelve!  The twenty pounds would scarcely carry her over a month, she would not be well for at least two; and then there was the doctor, the nurse, the flannels for the baby.  Alice tried to calculate, thinking plainly and honestly.  If a repulsive detail rose suddenly up in her mind, she did not shrink, nor was she surprised to find herself thinking of such things; she did so as a matter of course, keeping her thoughts fixed on the one object of doing her duty towards her friend.  And how to do this was the problem that presented itself unceasingly for solution.  She felt that somehow she would have to earn twenty pounds within the next month.  Out of the Lady’s Paper, in which ‘Notes and Sensations of a Plain Girl at Dublin Castle,’ was still running, she could not hope to make more than thirty shillings a week; a magazine had lately accepted a ten-page story worth, she fancied, about five pounds, but when they would print it and pay her was impossible to say.  She could write the editor an imploring letter, asking him to advance her the money.  But even then there was another nine pounds to make up.  And to do this seemed to her an impossibility.  She could not ask her father or mother; she would only do so if the worst came to the worst.  She would write paragraphs, articles, short stories, and would send them to every editor in London.  One out of three might turn up trumps.

’GARDNER STREET,
’MOUNTJOY SQUARE. 
’DARLING ALICE, ’I have been in Dublin now more than a week.  I did not write to you before because I wished to write to tell you that I had done all you told me to do.  The first thing I did was to go to the convent.  Would you believe it, the new Rev. Mother is Sister Mary who we knew so well at St. Leonards!  She has been transferred to the branch convent in Dublin; she was delighted to see me, but the sight of her dear face awoke so many memories, so many old associations, that I burst out crying, and it seemed to me impossible that I should ever be able to find courage to tell her the truth.  None will ever know what it cost me to speak the words.  They came to me all of a sudden, and I told her everything.  I thought she would reproach me and speak bitterly, but she only said,