"I don't believe I'll ask her, Rod. She's perfectly happy up there in New Ipswich, painting wild flowers and pressing ferns, and swinging those five children in her hammock, and carrying them all to drive in her pony-wagon, and getting up hampers of fish and baskets of fruit, and beef sirloins by express, and feeding them all up, and paying poor dear cousin Nan ten dollars a week for letting her do it. I guess it's my opportunity to get along here without her, and let her stay." "Incorruptible! Well--you're a good girl, Amy. I must come down to plain soft-sawder. Put some of those things together prettily, as you know how, and drive over and take them to Sylvie Argenter this afternoon, will you?" "Fish and fruit and sirloins!" "Amy, you're an aggravator!" "No. I'm only grammatical. I'm sure those were the antecedents." "If you don't, I will." "If you will, I will too, Rod! Drive me over, that's a good boy, and I'll go." Amy seized with delicate craft her opportunity for getting her brother off from one of his solitary, roaming expeditions with Red Squirrel that ended too often in not being solitary, but in bringing him into company with people who knew about horses, or had them to show, and were planning for races, and who were likely to lead Rodney, in spite of his innate gentlemanhood, into more of mere jockeyism than either she or her father liked. "But the flowers, I fancy, Rod, would be coals to Newcastle. They have a greenhouse." "And have never had a decent man to manage it. It came to nothing this year. She told me so. You see it just is a literal _new_ castle. Mr. Argenter is too busy in town to look after it; and they've been cheated and disappointed right and left. They're not to blame for being new," he continued, seeing the least possible little _lifted_ look about Amy's delicate lips and eyebrows. "I hate _that_ kind of shoddiness." "'Don't fire--I'll come down,'" said Amy, laughing. "And I don't think I ever get _very_ far up, beyond what's safe and reasonable for a"-- "Nice, well-bred little coon," said Rodney, patting her on the shoulder, in an exuberance of gracious approval and beamingly serene content. "I'll take you in my gig with Red Squirrel," he added, by way of reward of merit. Now Amy in her secret heart was mortally afraid of Red Squirrel, but she would have been upset ten times over--by Rodney--sooner than say so. When Sylvie Argenter, that afternoon, from her window with its cool, deep awning, saw Rodney Sherrett and his sister coming up the drive, there flashed across her, by a curious association, the thought of the young carpenter who had gone up the village street and bowed to Ray Ingraham, the baker's daughter. After all, the gentleman's "place," apart and retired, and the long "approach," were not so very much worse, when the "people in the carriages,"--the right people,--really came: and "on purpose" was not such a bad qualification of the coming, either.