Friday morning found Cis refreshed and ready to postpone her decision to move on, also quite sure that before the day was over she should hear from Mr. Lucas that he was ready to test her in the highly honorable position of his confidential clerk. Therefore her merry face was as bright as ever when she had finished her toilette and came down to breakfast like a sun maiden, all in white, her red hair gloriously shining above her snowy raiment. Two young men breakfasting together looked smilingly up at Cis as she passed their table, unmistakably ready to leap out into acquaintances at the least sign of welcome from her; indeed one of them slightly pushed out the chair next to him, leaning forward with an ingratiating smile. Cis knew the type and “had no time for it,” she would have said. “Call themselves men!” Cis once had exclaimed to Nan. After her solitary breakfast, which she enjoyed as a hungry girl should, Cis turned her mind upon the problem of how to dispose of that day; she found it insoluble. “May as well take a trolley and ride till it stops, but of all stupid things, sliding along past a lot of houses is the worst! Wish I had my bunch of little newsys here! Wonder if they miss me badly, poor little scraps! I made Tom Dowling promise he’d do something for them.” Cis left the dining room and went to the desk. Here she found two letters in the pigeonhole that bore the number of her room, but neither was from Mr. Lucas, as she had been sure one must be. There was a brief note from Jeanette Lucas in reply to one which Cis had written her, telling her that she had seen her uncle and that he held out hope of a position for her. Miss Lucas said nothing of herself beyond that she was to sail for Europe the following week. She wrote to Cis with much more than the politeness of a slight acquaintance; the short note breathed warmth of feeling for Cis, and a personal sadness that depressed Cis, though she could not have said wherein it lay. The other letter was a long one from Nan, full of love and longing for Cis, and all the trivial news of the office, her home, their common acquaintances, which are such important items to an exile, just because they are so homely and unimportant. Cis folded this letter and slipped it into her pocket with homesick heaviness of heart that surprised her. “Of course there’s nothing to prevent me from going back if I want to,” she reminded herself.