“Leave you! What, now? You darling Mother. As to resigning, I may later. But I'm going to Boston when I get my vacation and stay a week with Maria, and go to the opera if I never do another thing. Oh! just you wait, Mother, you and I will lead a different life after this.” “And you think, Abbie, you'll make more than six hundred dollars?” Already the mother's veins were expanding--wonderful elixir, this Extract of Gold. “Six hundred! Why, if the stock goes to what they call par--and that's where they all go, so Maria says--I'll have--have--two thousand, less Mr. Taylor's two hundred--I'll have eighteen hundred dollars!” The little fellow in her bosom was rubbing away now with all his might. She could hear his heart beat against her own. ***** It was nearly midnight when the two went to bed. Stick after stick had been thrown on the fire; the logs had flamed and crackled in sympathy with their own joyous feelings, and had then fallen into piled-up coals, each heap a castle of delight, rosy in the glow of freshly enkindled hopes. And the song in her heart never ceased. Day by day a fresh note was added; everything she touched; everything she saw was transformed. The old tumble-down house with its propped-up furniture and makeshift carpets seemed to have become already the place she planned it to be. There would be vines over the door and a new summer kitchen at the back'; and there would be a porch where her mother could sit, flowers all about her--her dear mother, bent no longer, but fresh and rosy in her new clothes, smiling at her as she came up the garden path. And what delight it was just to breathe the air! Never had her step been so light, or her daily walk to the dingy office--dingy no longer--so bracing. And the out-of-doors--the sky and drifting clouds; the low hills, bleak in the winter's gloom--what changes had come over them? Was it the first blush of the coming spring that had softened their lines, or had her eyes been blind to all their beauty? Oh! Marvellous elixir that makes hopes certainty and gilds each cloud! ***** One morning a man waiting for a letter from an absent son heard the telephone ring, and saw Abbie drop her letters and catch up the receiver: “Yes, I'm Miss Todd.--Oh! Mr. Keep? Yes.--Yes--I've got it here.” Her face grew deathly white. “What! Selling at twelve!” The man feared she was about to fall. “I thought you told me... A big slump! Well, I don't want to lose if... Yes, I'll mail it right away... Reach you by the 9.10 to-morrow.” “I hope you ain't got any bad news, have you?” the man asked in a sympathetic voice. “No,” she answered in a choking voice, as she handed him his letter; then she turned her back and took the certificate from her bosom.