“‘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.

And when Mrs. Argenter, hearing the bell, and the movement of an arrival, and not being herself summoned in consequence, rung in her own room for the maid, and received for answer to her inquiry,—­“Miss Sherrett and young Mr. Sherrett, ma’am, to see Miss Sylvie,”—­she turned back to her volume of “London Society,” much and mixedly reconciled in her thoughts to two things that occurred to her at once,—­one of them adding itself to the other as manifestly in the same remarkable order of providence; “that tip-out” from the basket-phaeton, and the new white frill-trimmed polonaise that Miss Sylvie would put on, so needlessly, this afternoon, in spite of her remonstrance that the laundress had just left without warning, and there was no knowing when they should ever find another.

“There is certainly a fate in these matters,” she said to herself, complacently. “One thing always follows another.”

Mrs. Argenter was apt to make to herself a “House that Jack built” out of her providences.  She had always a little string of them to rehearse in every history; from the malt that lay in the house, and the rat that ate the malt, up to the priest all shaven and shorn, that married the man that kissed the maid—­and so on, all the way back again.  She counted them up as they went along.  “There was the overturn,” she would say, by and by “and there was Rodney Sherrett’s call because of that, and then his sister’s because no doubt he asked her, and then their both coming together; and there was your pretty white polonaise, you know, the day they did come; and there was”—­Mrs. Argenter has not counted up to that yet.  Perhaps it may be a long while before she will so readily count it in.