"Of course you can stay where God puts you, dear," answered Desire Ledwith. "Let your side of it alone for a minute, and think of mine. If you were in my place,—trying to live as one of the large household, remember, and looking for your opportunities,—what would you say,—what would you plainly hear said to you,—about this?"
Sylvie was silent.
"Tell me truly, Sylvie. Put it into words. What would it be? What would you hear?"
"Just what you do, I suppose," said Sylvie, slowly "But I don't hear it on my side. My part doesn't seem to chord."
"Your part just pauses. There are no notes written just here, in your score. Your part is to wait. Think, and see if it isn't. The Dakie Thaynes are going out West again. Mr. Thayne knows about lands, and such things. He would do something, and let you know. A real business man would make this Saftleigh fellow afraid."
The Thaynes—Mrs. Dakie Thayne is our dear little old friend Ruth Holabird, you know—had been visiting in Boston; staying partly here, and partly at Mrs. Frank Scherman's. At Asenath's they were real "comfort-friends;" Asenath had the faculty of gathering only such about her. She felt no necessity, with them, for grand, late dinners, or any show; there was no trouble or complication in her household because of them. Ruth insisted upon the care of her own room; it was like the "coöperative times" at Westover. Mrs. Scherman said it was wonderful, when your links were with the right people, how simple you could make your art of living, you could actually be "quite Holabird-y," even in Boston! But this digresses.
"I shall speak to Mr. Thayne about it," said Desire. "And now, dear, if you could just mark these towels this morning?"
Sylvie sat marking the towels, and Desire passed to and fro, gathering things which were to go to Neighbor Street in the afternoon.
"Do you see," she said, stopping behind Sylvie a while after, and putting her fingers upon her hair with a caressing little touch,—"the sun has got round from the east to the south. It shines into this window now. And you have been keeping quiet, just doing your own little work of the moment. The world is all alive, and changing. Things are working—away up in the heavens—for us all. When people don't know which way to turn, it is very often good not to turn at all; if they are driven, they do know. Wait till you are driven, or see; you will be shown, one way or the other. It is almost always when things are all blocked up and impossible, that a happening comes. It has to. A dead block can't last, any more than a vacuum. If you are sure you are looking and ready, that is all you need. God is turning the world round all the time."
Desire did not say one word about the ninety-eight dollars which lay in one of the locked drawers of her writing desk, in precisely the shape in which every two or three weeks she had let Sylvie put the money into her hands. There would be a right time for that. She would force nothing. Sylvie would come near enough, yet, for that perfect understanding in which those bits of stamped paper would cease to be terrible between their hands, either way.