‘Perhaps you and I can manage the girls between us,’ said Mr. Vane.

‘Alie perhaps,’ began Mrs. Vane doubtfully.

‘Yes,’ said Bridget suddenly, to every one’s astonishment, ’if it was only Alie.  But it would never do for me.  I’d be too much for you and papa, mamma.’

She spoke quite gravely, but the others had hard work not to laugh.

‘How do you mean, Biddy?’ asked her father.

‘I’m very tiresome to teach; often I’m very cross indeed,’ replied the child complacently.

‘But you need not be; you can help being so if you try,’ said Mr. Vane.

‘Well, I don’t like trying, I suppose it’s that,’ she answered.

For the moment her father thought it wiser to say no more.

Mr. Redding happened to call that morning, and at luncheon Mrs. Vane told Alie and Bride that she was going to Seacove, and they might go with her.

Alie’s eyes sparkled.

‘Are you going to——­’ she began, and her mother seemed to understand her without any more words.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have got all the measures.’

‘And oh, mamma,’ asked Biddy, too full of her own ideas to notice these mysterious sayings, ’will you go to Pier Street and let us show you where Celestina lives.  And if you could think of something you wanted to buy, just any little thing, a pencil or some envelopes or anything—­they’ve got everything—­we might go into the shop, and I daresay if the nice mamma saw you, she’d ask you to step into the parlour too.’

‘We shall see,’ mamma replied.

But ‘We shall see’ was this time accompanied by a little smile, which made Bridget think that the ‘We shall see’ was perhaps a way of saying ‘Yes.’

Mamma had several messages to do at Seacove, and though Biddy was in a great hurry to get to Pier Street, she was rather interested in the other shops also.  At the draper’s, Mrs. Vane made some small purchases, as to which Alie showed great concern.  One was of pretty pink glazed calico and of some other shiny stuff called ’chintz’—­white, with tiny lines of different colours; she also bought some red cotton velvet and neat-looking white spotted muslin, and several yards of very narrow lace of a very small and dainty pattern, and other things, all of which interested Alie very much indeed, though after a while Biddy got tired of looking on, and went and stood at the doorway of the shop.

’I am sorry to give you the trouble of taking down so many things when I only want such a short length of each,’ said Mrs. Vane civilly to the shopman—­or shopwoman, I think it was.  ’But the fact is I am buying all these odds and ends for my little girl’s’—­and here she glanced round to make sure that Bridget was out of hearing—­’for my little girl’s doll-house, which needs doing up;’ by which information Mrs. Cutter, the draper’s wife, was much edified, repeating it to her special cronies at Seacove, together with her opinion that the new rector’s wife was a most pleasant-spoken lady.