“Coming home Saturday nights?  Well, you do get about the best of me so.  And we fellows get just the right little sprinkle of family influence, too.  It loses its affect when you have it all the time.  That’s what I tell Truesdaile, when he goes on about home, and what a thing it is to have a sister,—­he doesn’t exactly say my sister; I suppose he believes in the tenth commandment.  By the way, he’s knocking round at the seashore some where using up the time.  I’ve half a mind to hunt him up and get him back here for the last week or so.  I think he’d like it.”

“Nonsense, Rod!  You can’t.  When Aunt Euphrasia’s away.”

“She would come back, if you asked her; wouldn’t she?  I think it would be a charity.  Put it to her as an opportunity.  She’d drop anything she might be about for an opportunity.  I wonder if she ever goes back upon her tracks and finishes up?  She’s something like a mowing machine:  a grand good thing, but needs a scythe to follow round and pick out the stumps and corners.”

Amy shook her head.

“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.”