"My dear--" said Mr. Somers--"do you think it is quite--a--politic, to tell Mrs. Davids she don't bring up her children right? Mrs. Davids is a very respectable woman--and so is Farmer Davids--none more so." "I don't know what you call respectable women--" said Mrs. Somers--"I should be sorry to think _he_ was. But I just wish, Mr. Somers, that you would preach a sermon to the people about cutting off their children's tongues if they can't keep them in order. I declare! I could hardly keep hands off that boy." And with this suggested and suggestive text, Mr. Somers retired to his study. It had been a busy day with more than Mr. Somers, when towards the close of the afternoon Faith came out upon the porch of her mother's house. She had not read more than one delicious bit of her letter on the ride home from Neanticut; the light failed too soon. After getting home there was no more chance. Saturday night, that Saturday, had a crowd of affairs. And Monday had been a day full of business. Faith had got through with it all at last; and now, as fresh as if the kitchen had been a bygone institution--though that was as true of Faith in the kitchen as out of it--she sat down in the afternoon glow to read the letter. The porch was nice to match; she took a low seat on the step, and laying the letter in her lap rested her elbow on the yellow floor of the porch to take it at full ease. It was not just such a letter as is most often found in biographies,--yet such as may be found--'out of print.' A bright medley of description and fancy--mountains and legends and scraps of song forming a mosaic of no set pattern. And well-read as the writer was in other respects, it was plain that she was also learned in both the books Faith had had at Neanticut. The quick flow of the letter was only checked now and then by a little word-gesture of affection,--if that could be called a check, which gave to the written pictures a better glow than lit up the originals. It was something to see Faith read that letter--or would have been, if anybody had been there to look. She leaned over it in a sort of breathless abstraction, catching her breath a little sometimes in a way that told of the interest at work. The interest was not merely what would have belonged to the letter for any reader,--it was not merely the interest that attached to the writer of it, nor to the person for whom it was written; it was not only the interest deep and great which Faith felt in the subjects and objects spoken of in the letter. All these wrought with their full power; but all these were not enough to account for the intent and intense feeling with which Faith bent over that letter, with eyes that never wavered, and a cheek in which the blood mounted to a bright flush. And when it was done, even then she sat still leaning over the paper, looking not at it but through it.