“Quite admirably,” echoed Miss Matilda. “Lucidity without verbosity should be the characteristic of all epistolary communications, and I am pleased to find that in this instance, as in so many others, our dear niece has not failed to profit by our teaching.” Then to Ethel she said: “You had better post the letter yourself, dear, and then no eyes but your own will have cognisance of the address.” This Ethel deferred doing till later in the day, when another errand would take her into the town. For the present she laid the letter aside and quietly resumed the sewing on which she had been engaged when Miss Blair knocked at the door. She was a shade paler than common, but perfectly composed, as, indeed, she had been when telling the sisters Hetty’s news. They now glanced at her and then at each other. Not for the world would either of the sisters have been willing that their dear girl should imagine their hearts did not bleed for her in her trouble, and yet they felt that her very quietude imposed upon them a certain restraint in the expression of the sympathy they were longing to give vent to. Miss Jane, who was the more romantic of the two and still retained a vivid recollection of several of the heroines of the Rosa Matilda school of fiction on which her fancy had been nourished when a young woman scarcely out of her teens, would have held it to be no more than appropriate if, at the close of her interview with Miss Blair, Ethel had rushed into the sitting-room, her hair unbound and disordered and a frenzied glare in her eyes, and after a few incoherent exclamations, had either swooned right away, or gone off into violent hysterics. All Miss Jane’s heroines had been addicted either to swooning or hysterics at the tragic crises of their lives, and that Ethel had failed to follow so proper an example was just a trifle disappointing. To Miss Matilda it seemed that the sooner Ethel was encouraged to open her heart and seek from others that sympathy which, when we know it to be genuine, rarely fails to carry with it some measure of comfort, the better it would be for her. “And yet,” she added to herself by way of afterthought, “it is not expected of the patient that he should probe his own wounds; it rests with others to do that. Just as likely as not, the dear girl wonders and feels hurt because neither my sister nor I by as much as a word have led her on to unbosom herself to us. She is evidently waiting for me to speak, and yet how to begin, or what to say, I know not.” She let her hands drop on her lap with a faint sigh. Her thimble fell unheeded on the floor. She was sitting by one of the two open windows and her gaze strayed out into the sunlit garden, while there came into her face a look of such perplexity and distress that Ethel, glancing up from her seat by the other window and seeing it, felt a sudden gush of pity and remorse.