There were other minor disappointments--portions of her plan, so to speak, which had failed to materialize--but the net result of a month’s trial was distinctly hopeful. Although most of such work as had come to her was from the factory-girls, not a few ladies had visited the little store, and made purchases or given orders. Among these she liked best of all the one who owned the house; a very friendly old person, with corkscrew curls and an endless tongue--Miss Tabitha Wilcox. She had already made two bonnets for her, and the elderly lady had been so pleasant and talkative that she had half resolved, when next she came in, to unfold to her the scheme which now lay nearest to her heart. This was nothing less than securing permission to use a long-deserted and roomy building which stood in the yard, at the back of the one she occupied, as a sort of evening club for the working-girls of the town. Jessica had never been in this building, but so far as she could see through the stained and dismantled windows, where the drifts did not render approach impossible, it had formerly been a dwelling-house, and later had been used in part as a carpenter’s shop. To get this, and to fit it up simply but comfortably as a place where the tired factory and sewing girls could come in the evening, to read or talk or play games if they liked, to merely sit still and rest if they chose, but in either case to be warm and contented and sheltered from the streets and the deadly boredom of squalid lodgings, became little by little her abiding ambition. She had spoken tentatively to some of the girls about it, and they were all profoundly enthusiastic over the plan. It remained to enlist the more fortunate women whose assistance could alone make the plan feasible. Jessica had essayed to get at the parson’s wife, Mrs. Turner; but that lady, after having been extremely cordial, had unaccountably all at once turned icy cold, and cut the girl dead in the street. I said “unaccountably,” but Jessica was not at all at a loss to comprehend the change, and the bitterness of the revelation had thrown her into an unusually deep fit of depression. For a time it had seemed to her hopeless to try to find another confidante in that class which despised and shrank from her. Then Miss Tabitha’s pleasant words and transparent good-heartedness had lifted her out of her despondency, and she was almost resolved now to approach her on the subject of the house iii the back yard. CHAPTER XVI.--A GRACIOUS FRIEND RAISED UP. The opportunity which Jessica sought came with unlooked-for promptness--in fact, before she had quite resolved what to ask for, and how best to prefer her request.