It was on this day, a cold Sunday afternoon shortly before Christmas, that the lonely girl carried out a good intention she had had in mind for some time. She wrote a long, intimate, sisterly letter to her favorite brother Tommy, who had got so far away since he married money in Pittsburg. Angela had just come in from a freezing, eventless walk with Fanny Warder. (Fanny, who as Mrs. Flower said, had made a great success of her life, marrying at twenty, seemed to be on an indefinite "visit"; there was talk, of course.) Having first thawed her hands at her register, which was supposed to waft up heat from the stove in the dining-room below, but didn't particularly, Angela drew up her rocking-chair into the zone of ostensible warmth. She sat with one slender foot curled under her, by a trick that no man has ever mastered. And this time she had not searched for the formal tools of a note-writer, but employed a stub of a pencil and a pad upon her lifted knee. "Dearest Tommy," wrote Angela, and followed with a solid paragraph of very affectionate greeting. She went on:-- Well, Tommy, I promised to write you how things were, after we got settled down. I must say the outlook is rather discouraging at times--and home isn't what it was as you remember it! Do you remember what fun we used to have even in Hunter's Run--driving in to "the balls"--and how fine it was in Mitchellton as long as you were there? Well, everything is _sadly_ changed now! Wallie, I'm afraid, hasn't improved as he gets older, he seems to rarely or never think of anybody but himself--and, of course, having fun is simply something he _doesn't care for_! He shuts himself up in his room every night, making horrible mixtures in a "sink" he's put in--that smell up the whole house, and never _dreams_ of contributing to the housekeeping expenses--though he's been raised now to _ten dollars a week_! Father is sadly changed, he gets quieter and quieter all the time.