During the early winter she received two or three more letters
of the same kind, each enclosing in its loose husk of rhetoric a
smaller kernel of fact. By dint of patient interlinear study, Ann
Eliza gathered from them that Evelina and her husband, after
various costly experiments in boarding, had been reduced to a
tenement-house flat; that living in St. Louis was more expensive
than they had supposed, and that Mr. Ramy was kept out late at
night (why, at a jeweller's, Ann Eliza wondered?) and found his
position less satisfactory than he had been led to expect. Toward
February the letters fell off; and finally they ceased to come.

At first Ann Eliza wrote, shyly but persistently, entreating
for more frequent news; then, as one appeal after another was
swallowed up in the mystery of Evelina's protracted
silence, vague fears began to assail the elder sister. Perhaps
Evelina was ill, and with no one to nurse her but a man who could
not even make himself a cup of tea! Ann Eliza recalled the layer
of dust in Mr. Ramy's shop, and pictures of domestic disorder
mingled with the more poignant vision of her sister's illness. But
surely if Evelina were ill Mr. Ramy would have written. He wrote
a small neat hand, and epistolary communication was not an
insuperable embarrassment to him. The too probable alternative was
that both the unhappy pair had been prostrated by some disease
which left them powerless to summon her--for summon her they surely
would, Ann Eliza with unconscious cynicism reflected, if she or her
small economies could be of use to them! The more she strained her
eyes into the mystery, the darker it grew; and her lack of
initiative, her inability to imagine what steps might be taken to
trace the lost in distant places, left her benumbed and helpless.