After a little, both aunts were laboring upon a difficult and baffling work in Helen's chamber.

Patiently and earnestly, with their stiff old fingers, they were trying to forge the required note.

They made failure after failure, but they improved little by little all the time.

The pity of it all, the pathetic humor of it, there was none to see; they themselves were unconscious of it.

Often their tears fell upon the notes and spoiled them; sometimes a single misformed word made a note risky which could have been ventured but for that; but at last Hannah produced one whose script was a good enough imitation of Helen's to pass any but a suspicious eye, and bountifully enriched it with the petting phrases and loving nicknames that had been familiar on the child's lips from her nursery days.