“I mean, I know how she takes other girls to ride; she sets them down at the small gray house,—­the house without any piazza or bay window, Michael!” and Mr. Argenter laughed.  That was the order he had heard Sylvie give one day when he had come up with his own carriage at the post-office in the village, whither he had walked over for exercise and the evening papers.  Sylvie had Aggie Townsend with her, and she put her head out at the window on one side just as her father passed on the other, and directed Michael, with a very elegant nonchalance, to “set this little girl down” as aforesaid.  Mr. Argenter had been half amused and half angry.  The anger passed off, but he had kept up the joke.

“O, do let that old story alone,” exclaimed Mrs. Argenter.  “Sylvie will soon outgrow all that.  If you want to make her a real lady, there is nothing like letting her get thoroughly used to having things.”

“I don’t intend her to get used to having a pony-chaise,” Mr. Argenter said very quietly and shortly.  “If she wants to ’show a kindness,’ and take ‘other’ girls to ride, there’s the slide-top buggy and old Scrub.  She may have that as often as she pleases.”

And Mrs. Argenter knew that this ended—­or had better end—­the conversation.

For that time.  Sylvie Argenter did get used to having a pony-chaise, after all.  Her mother waited six months, until the pleasant summer weather, when her friends began to come out from the city to spend days with her, or to take early teas, and Michael had to be sent continually to meet and leave them at the trains.  Then she began again, and asked for a pony-chaise for herself.  To “save the cost of it in Michael’s time, and the wear and tear of the heavy carriages.  Those little sunset drives would be such a pleasure to her, just when Michael had to be milking and putting up for the night.”  Mr. Argenter had forgotten all about the other talk, Sylvie’s name now being not once mentioned; and the end of it was that a pretty little low phaeton was added to the Argenter equipages, and that Sylvie’s mother was always lending it to her.

So Sylvie was driving about in it this afternoon.  She had been over to West Dorbury to see the Highfords, and was coming round by Ingraham’s Corner, to stop there and buy one of his fresh big loaves of real brown bread for her father’s tea.  It was a little unspoken, politic understanding between Sylvie and her mother, that some small, acceptable errand like this was to be accomplished whenever the former had the basket-phaeton of an afternoon.  By quiet, unspoken demonstration, Mr. Argenter was made to feel in his own little comforts what a handy thing it was to have a daughter flitting about so easily with a pony-carriage.

But there was something else to be accomplished this time that Sylvie had not thought of, and that when it happened, she felt with some dismay might not be quite offset and compensated for by the Ingraham brown bread.