of the cold, until a call from within made her slowly close the door and return into the brightness that looked doubly bright after the darkness without.

“Father and Hugh won’t come any the quicker because you send a draught right through the house, dear!” a pleasant-looking girl of two or three-and-twenty remarked, as Sydney came dancing and singing into the shabby school-room after her third unsuccessful journey to the door; “they are hardly ever in before half-past five, you know.”

“It feels like half-past six, at least!” cried Sydney. “Oh, dear! oh, dear! I’ve never known half-past five so awfully long in coming!”

“Sydney! Sydney!” Mildred said reprovingly, “don’t you remember what mother was[9] saying to you only yesterday? You really must give up slang and schoolgirl ways, now you are going to be eighteen next month, and to put your hair up, and leave off doing proper lessons and——”

[9]

“And become a real, celebrated authoress!” shouted Tom, who was despatching bread and butter at the table with a highly satisfactory appetite. “You’ll have to mind your shaky grammar now, Syd.”

“Of course I shan’t be a celebrated authoress quite at once,” said Sydney modestly. “I believe you are usually rather more grown up than eighteen first, and have a little more experience. But it makes one feel ever so much older when one is really going to be in print.”

“And when you’ve earned a whole guinea—twenty-one whole shillings!” little Prissie contributed in an absolutely awestruck voice.

“Read us the letter again, Syd,” Hal demanded, stretching out his long legs to the cheerful blaze. “Go ahead; I really don’t think I took it all in.”

And Sydney, nothing loth, produced that wonderful letter, which had come in quite an ordinary way by the four o’clock post that afternoon, together with an advertisement about a dairy-farm for mother, and an uninteresting-looking[10] envelope for father, with “Lincoln’s Inn” upon the back.

[10]

The outside of her letter was quite ordinary-looking too, Sydney had thought, when Fred and Prissie had almost torn the envelope in half, in their anxiety each to have the pleasure of bringing it upstairs to her. Just a narrow envelope, with something stamped upon the back, and her name in very scrawly 

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