“What a long talk we have had!  How did we get into it?”

The car was coming up the slope, half a mile off.  They could see the red top of it rising, and could hear the tinkle of the bell.

“I wish we didn’t need to get out!” said Sylvie.  “I wish I could tell it to my mother!”

“Can’t you?”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t keep alive,—­with me,” Sylvie answered, with a little sigh and shadow.  “Not even as these flowers will that I am taking to her.  I can take,—­but I can’t give, and I always feel so that I ought to.  Mother needs the comfort of it.  Why don’t you come and talk to her, Miss Kirkbright?”

“Talk on purpose never does.  You and I ‘got into it,’ as you say.  Perhaps your mother and I might.  But I have got over feeling about such sort of giving—­in words—­as a duty.  Even with people whom I work among sometimes, who need the very first gift of truth, so much!  We can only keep near and dear to each other, Sylvie, and near and dear to the Lord.  Then there are the two lines; and things that are equal—­or similarly related—­to the same thing, are related to one another.  He can make the mark that proves and joins, any time.  Did you know there was Bible in geometry, Sylvie?  I very often go to my old school Euclid for a heavenly comfort.”

“I think you go to everything for it—­and to everybody with it,” said Sylvie, squeezing her friend’s hand as he left her on the car-step.

Nothing comes much before we need it.  This talk stayed by Sylvie through months afterwards, if not the word of it, always the subtle cheer and strength of it, that nestled into her heart underneath all her upper thinkings and cares of day by day, and would not quite let them settle down upon the living core of it with a hopeless pressure.

For the real stress of her new life was bearing upon her heavily.  The first poetry, the first fresh touches with which she had made pleasant signs about their altered condition, were passed into established use, and dulled into wornness and commonness.  The difficulties—­the grapples—­came thick and forceful about her.  At the same time, her reliances seemed slipping away from her.

She had hardly known, any more than her mother, how much the countenance and friendliness of the Sherrett family had done in upholding her.  It was a link with the old things—­the very best of the old things,—­that stood as a continual assurance that they themselves were not altered—­lowered in any way—­by their alterings.  This came to Sylvie with an interior confirmation, as it did to Mrs. Argenter exteriorly.  So long as Miss Kirkbright and the Sherretts indorsed anything, it could not harm them much, or fence them out altogether from what they had been.  Amy Sherrett and Miss Kirkbright thought well of the Ingrahams, and maintained all their dealings with them in a friendly—­even intimate—­fashion.  If Sylvie chose to sit with them of an afternoon, it was no more than