where the post-office was kept. She slipped the thin parcel
through the slit in the door, and then stole home again,
feeling a strange sense of loss and loneliness. It was as if
she had given away the last link between herself and her
youth. But she did not regret it. It would give Sylvia
pleasure, and that had come to be the overmastering passion of
the Old Lady's heart.

The next night the light in Sylvia's room burned very late,
and the Old Lady watched it triumphantly, knowing the meaning
of it. Sylvia was reading her father's poems, and the Old Lady
in her darkness read them too, murmuring the lines over and
over to herself. After all, giving away the book had not
mattered so very much. She had the soul of it still--and the
fly-leaf with the name, in Leslie's writing, by which nobody
ever called her now.

The Old Lady was sitting on the Marshall sofa the next Sewing
Circle afternoon when Sylvia Gray came and sat down beside
her. The Old Lady's hands trembled a little, and one side of a
handkerchief, which was afterwards given as a Christmas
present to a little olive-skinned coolie in Trinidad, was not
quite so exquisitely done as the other three sides.

Sylvia at first talked of the Circle, and Mrs. Marshall's
dahlias, and the Old Lady was in the seventh heaven of
delight, though she took care not to show it, and was even a
little more stately and finely mannered than usual. When she
asked Sylvia how she liked living in Spencervale, Sylvia said,