unt Henderson, after a
pause.

"Well, there are the Homes, and the Offices, and the Ministers at Large.
At a Home, they would probably recommend you somebody they've made up
their minds to put out to service, and she might or might not be such as
would suit you. Then at the Offices, you'll see all sorts, and mostly
poor ones."

"I'll try an Office, first," interrupted Miss Henderson. "I _want_ to
see all sorts. Faith, you'll go with me, by and by, won't you, and help
me find the way?"

Faith, seated at a little writing table at the farther end of the room,
busied in copying into her album, in a clear, neat, but rather stiff
schoolgirl's hand, the oracle of the night before, did not at once
notice that she was addressed.

"Faith, child! don't you hear?"

"Oh, yes, aunt. What is it?"

"I want you to go to a what-d'ye-call-it office with me, to-day."

"An intelligence office," explained her mother. "Aunt Faith wants to
find a girl."

"'_Lucus a non lucendo_,'" quoted Faith, rather wittily, from her little
stock of Latin. "Stupidity offices, _I_ should call them, from the
specimens they send out."

"Hold your tongue, chit! Don't talk Latin to me!" growled Aunt
Henderson.

"What are you writing?" she asked, shortly after, when Mrs. Gartney had
again left her and Faith to each other. "Letters, or Latin?"

Faith colored, and laughed.

"Only a fortune that was told me last night," she replied.

"Oh! 'A little husband,' I suppose, 'no bigger than my thumb; put him in
a pint pot, and there bid him drum.'"

"No," said Faith, half seriously, and half teased out of her
seriousness. "It's nothing of that sort. At least," she added, glancing
over the lines again, "I don't think it means anything like that."

And Faith laid down the book, and went upstairs for a word with her
mother.

Aunt Henderson, who had been brought up in times when all the doings of
young girls were strictly supervised, and who had no high-flown
scruples, because she had no mean motives, deliberately walked over and
fetched the elegant little volume from the table, reseated herself in
her armchair--felt for her glasses, and set them carefully upon her
nose--and, as her grandniece returned, was just finishing her perusal
of the freshly inscribed lines.

"Humph! A good fortune. Only you've got to earn it."

"Yes," said Faith, quite gravely. "And I don't see how. There doesn't
seem to be much that I can do."

"Just take hold of the first t