Nadie had been so
sensible about it. This was a letter from home, and the
American mail was not due until next day. Inside there
would be news of a little pleasure trip to New York,
which her father and mother had been planning lately
--Elfrida constantly urged upon her parents the necessity
of amusing themselves--and a remittance. The remittance
would be more than usually welcome, for she was a little
in debt--a mere trifle, fifty or sixty francs; but Elfrida
hated being in debt. She tore the end of the envelope
across with absolute satisfaction, which was only half
chilled when she opened out each of the four closely
written sheets of foreign letter-paper in turn and saw
that the usual postal order was not there.
Having ascertained this however, she went back to her
egg; in another ten seconds it would have been hard-boiled,
a thing she detested. There was the, egg, and there was
some apricot-jam--the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian
silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of
wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread
and the butter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended
damask with a pattern of rosebuds and a coronet in one
corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.
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