gets to be so
much worse, here and there and everywhere, that I'm longing for you
to be safe back in Cambridge."

"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 gentlemanhoo