Mattie remarked that she had turned the box full amongst the letter-paper. Harriet sat herself down to write the letter after much preparation and agitation; Mattie looked at her, sitting there, in the full light of the gas above her head, and thought how pretty a _child_ she looked--how unfit to cope with the world's harshness--how lucky for her that she was the only child of parents who had made money for her, and so smoothed one road in life at least. Yes, more a child than a woman even then; captious, excitable, easily influenced, swayed by a passing gust of passion like a leaf, trembling at the present, at the future, always unresolved, and yet always, by her trust and confidence in others, even by her sympathy for others, to be loved. Mattie went into the shop, leaving Harriet to compose her epistle; after a while, and when she was brooding on the parcel again, and wondering if Mrs. Watts were at the bottom of the robbery, Harriet called her. She took her place again on the neutral ground, between parlour and shop, and found Harriet very much discomfited; her face flushed, her fair hair ruffled about her ears, her blue eyes full of tears. "I don't know what to say--I can't think of anything that's kind enough, and good enough for _him_. What would you say, Mattie?" "And you that have had so much money spent on your education to ask me--still a poor, ignorant, half-taught girl, Miss Harriet!" "I'm too flurried to collect my thoughts--I _can't_ think of the right words," she said; "I can't tell him of Mr. Darcy before Mr. Darcy has spoken to me--and I--I don't like to write down that I--I don't love him--never did love him--it looks so spiteful, dear! Mattie, what would you say?" "I should simply tell him the story which you told me." "He might show the letter to father and mother, who are anxious--oh! much more anxious than you fancy--to marry me to Sidney." "They know his value, Harriet." "And then it will all come at once to trouble them, instead of breaking it by degrees. Well, it's my fate. I must not keep it from them." "No. How much have you written?" "'Dear Sidney'--and--and the day of the month, of course. Oh! dear--here he is!" Away went paper and pens into the desk again, and the desk cleared from the table, and turned topsy-turvy on to a chair. "Oh! the top of the ink-stand's out--look here!--oh! what a mess there'll be!" cried Mattie. Harriet reversed the desk. "Perhaps it's not all spilt--I'm very sorry to have made such a mess of it, and--and it's only Sidney's father, after all. Don't tell him I'm here." The old gentleman came into the shop, and nodded towards Mattie standing in the doorway. "Has my boy come home?" he asked. "Not yet, sir." The father's countenance assumed a doleful expression on the instant--life without his boy was scarcely worth having. "He's very late, then, for I'm late," looking at his watch; "I hope he hasn't been run over." Mattie laughed at the expression of the father's fear.