“How busy she will be!” was Sylvie’s next remark, made after a pause in which she realized to herself the news, and received also a little suggestion from it.

“Yes, pretty busy.  But such preparations are made easily in these days.”

“Won’t there be ever so many little things of that sort to be done?” asked Sylvie, signifying the parcel which Miss Kirkbright held lightly in her fingers.  “I wish I could do some of them.  I mean,”—­she gathered herself up bravely to say,—­“I should like dearly to do anything for Amy; but I have thought it would be a good plan—­if I could—­to do something like that for the sake of earning; as Dot Ingraham does.”

“Do you not have quite enough money, my dear?” asked Miss Kirkbright, in her kindly direct way that could never hurt.

“Not quite.  At least, it don’t seem to go very far.  There are always things that we didn’t expect.  And things count up so at the grocer’s.  And a little nice meat every day,—­which we have to have,—­turns out so very expensive.  And Sabina’s wages—­and mother’s wine—­and cream—­and fresh eggs,—­I get so worried when the bills come in!”

Sylvie’s voice trembled with the effort and excitement of telling her money and housekeeping troubles.

“Sometimes I think we ought to have a cheaper girl; but I have just as much as I can do,—­of those kinds of work,—­and a poor girl would waste everything if I left her to go on.  And I don’t know much, myself.  If Sabina were to go,—­and she will next spring,—­I am afraid it would turn out that we should have to keep two.”

For all Sylvie’s little “afternoons out,” it was very certain that she, and Sabina also, did have their hands full at home.  It is wonderful how much work one person, who does none of it and who must live fastidiously, can make in a small household.  From Mrs. Argenter’s hot water, and large bath, and late breakfast in the morning to her glass of milk at nine o’clock at night, which she never could remember to carry up herself from the tea-table,—­she needed one person constantly to look after her individual wants.  And she couldn’t help it, poor lady, either; that is the worst of it; one gets so as not to be able to help things; “it was the shape of her head,” Sabina said, in a phrase she had learned of the cabinet-maker.

“You shall have anything you can do; just as Dot does,” said Miss Euphrasia.  “And Amy will like it all the better for your doing.  You can put the love into the work, as much as we shall into the pay.”

Was there ever anybody who handled the bare facts of life so graciously as this Miss Euphrasia?  She did it by taking right hold of them, by their honest handles,—­as they were meant to be taken hold of.

“You like your home?  You haven’t grown tired of being a village girl?” she said, as she and Sylvie sat down on a great flat projecting rock in the shaded walk beside the railroad track.  They had just missed one car; there would not be another for twenty minutes.