"We can bear it well if we bear it together," wrote Mrs.Bell.

"You have always been our brave daughter, and your young courage will be invaluable to us now.

Your talents will be our flowers by the way-side.

We shall take the keenest possible delight in watching them expand, as, even under the cloud of financial adversity, we know they will." "Dear over-confident parent," Elfrida reflected grimly at this point, "I must yet prove that I have any." Along with the situation she studied elaborately the third page of the _Sparta Sentinel_.

When it had arrived, months before, containing the best part of a long letter describing Paris, which she had written to her mother in the first freshness of her delighted impressions, she had glanced over it with half-amused annoyance at the foolish parental pride that suggested printing it.