Miss Euphrasia went up to Brickfields. Sylvie Argenter was to follow her on Thursday. It had been settled that she should remain with Desire, who, with her husband, would reach home on Saturday. It was a sweet, pleasant spring day, when Sylvie Argenter, with some last boxes and packages, took the northward train for Tillington. She was going to a life of use and service. She was going into a home; a home that not only made a fitting place for her in it, and was perfect in itself, but that, with noble plan and enlargement, found way to reach its safety and benediction, and the contagion of its spirit, over souls that would turn toward it, come under its rule, and receive from it, as their only shelter and salvation; over a neighborhood that was to be a planting of Hope,--a heavenly feudality. Sylvie's own dreams of a possible future for herself were only purple lights upon a far horizon. It seemed a very great way off, any bringing to speech and result the mute, infrequent signs of what was yet the very real, secret strength and joy and hope of her girl's heart. She had a thought of Rodney Sherrett that she was sure she had a right to. That was all she wanted, yet. Of course, Rodney was not ready to marry; he was too young; he was not much older than she was, and that was very young for a man. She did not even think about it; she recognized the whole position without thinking. She remembered vividly the little way-station in Middlesex, where he had bought the ferns, that day in last October; she thought of him as the train ran slowly alongside the platform at East Keaton. She wondered if he would not sometimes come up for a Sunday; to spend it with his uncle and his Aunt Euphrasia. It was a secret gladness to her that she was to be where he partly, and very affectionately, belonged. She was sure she should see him, now and then. Her life looked pleasant to her, its current setting alongside one current, certainly, of his. She sat thinking how he had come up behind her that day in the drawing-room car, and of all the happy nonsense they had begun to talk, in such a hurry, together. She was lost in the imagination of that old surprise, living it over again, remembering how it had seemed when she suddenly knew that it was he who touched her shoulder. Her thought of him was a backward thought, with a sense in it of his presence just behind her again, perhaps, if she should turn her head,--which she would not do, for all the world, to break the spell,--when suddenly,--face to face,--through the car-window, she awoke to his eyes and smile. "How did you know?" she asked, as he came in and took the seat beside her. Then she blushed to think what she had taken for granted.