Mrs. Argenter was anxiously alarmed at the child’s low tastes.  Yet these were very practicably compatible with the alternations of importance in being driven about in her father’s barouche, taking Aggie Townsend up on the road, and “setting her down at the small gray house.”

Sylvie thought, this afternoon, looking at Ray Ingraham, in her striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist and cross-banded, machine-stitched double skirt, sitting by her shady window, beyond which, behind the garden angle, rose up the red brick wall of the bakehouse, whence came a warm, sweet smell of many new-drawn loaves,—­looking around within, at the snug tidiness of the simple room, and even out at the street close by, with its stir and curious interest, yet seen from just as real a shelter as she had in her own chamber at home,—­that it might really be nice to be a baker’s daughter and live in the village,—­“when it wasn’t your own fault, and you couldn’t help it.”

Ray nodded to some one out of her window.

Sylvie saw a bright color come up in her cheeks, and a sparkle into her eyes as she did so, while a little smile, that she seemed to think was all to herself, crept about her mouth and lingered at the dimpled corners.  There was an expression as if she hid herself quite away in some consciousness of her own, from any recollection of the strange girl sitting by.

The strange girl glanced from her window, and saw a young carpenter with his box of tools go past under the elm, with some sort of light subsiding also in like manner from his face.  He was in his shirt sleeves,—­but the sleeves were white,—­and his straw hat was pushed back from his forehead, about which brown curls lay damp with heat.  Sylvie did not believe he had even touched his hat, when he had looked up through the friendly elm boughs and bowed to the village girl in her shady corner.  His hands were full, of course.  Such people’s hands were almost always full.  That was the reason they did not learn such things.  But how cute it had been of Ray Ingraham not to sit in the front window!  He was certain to come by, too, she supposed.  To be sure; that was the street.  Ray Ingraham would not have cared to live up a long avenue, to wait for people to come on purpose, in carriages.

She got as far as this in her thinkings, at the same moment that she came to the bottom of her cup of tea.  And then she caught a glimpse of Rylocks, rolling the phaeton across from the smithy.

“What a funny time I have had!  And how kind you have all been!” she said, getting up.  “I am ever so much obliged, Miss Ingraham.  I wonder”—­and then, suddenly, she thought it might not be quite civil to wonder.

Ray Ingraham laughed.

“So do I!” she said quickly, with a bright look.  She knew well enough what Sylvie stopped at.

Each of these two girls wondered if there would ever be any more “getting in behind” for them, as regarded each other, in their two different lives.