the last century would have thought that she did not know her business, if she had not gone through this preliminary process; and the farmers’ wives and daughters treated it all as a matter of course, replying with a good deal of independent humour to the customer, who, once having discovered where good butter and fresh eggs were to be sold, came time after time to depreciate the articles she always ended in taking.  There was leisure for all this kind of work in those days.

Molly had tied a knot on her pink-spotted handkerchief for each of the various purchases she had to make; dull but important articles needed for the week’s consumption at home; if she forgot any one of them she knew she was sure of a good ‘rating’ from her mother.  The number of them made her pocket-handkerchief look like one of the nine-tails of a ‘cat;’ but not a single thing was for herself, nor, indeed, for any one individual of her numerous family.  There was neither much thought nor much money to spend for any but collective wants in the Corney family.

It was different with Sylvia.  She was going to choose her first cloak, not to have an old one of her mother’s, that had gone down through two sisters, dyed for the fourth time (and Molly would have been glad had even this chance been hers), but to buy a bran-new duffle cloak all for herself, with not even an elder authority to curb her as to price, only Molly to give her admiring counsel, and as much sympathy as was consistent with a little patient envy of Sylvia’s happier circumstances.  Every now and then they wandered off from the one grand subject of thought, but Sylvia, with unconscious art, soon brought the conversation round to the fresh consideration of the respective merits of gray and scarlet.  These girls were walking bare-foot and carrying their shoes and stockings in their hands during the first part of their way; but as they were drawing near Monkshaven they stopped, and turned aside along a foot-path that led from the main-road down to the banks of the Dee.  There were great stones in the river about here, round which the waters gathered and eddied and formed deep pools.  Molly sate down on the grassy bank to wash her feet; but Sylvia, more active (or perhaps lighter-hearted with the notion of the cloak in the distance), placed her basket on a gravelly bit of shore, and, giving a long spring, seated herself on a stone almost in the middle of the stream.  Then she began dipping her little rosy toes in the cool rushing water and whisking them out with childish glee.

‘Be quiet, wi’ the’, Sylvia?  Thou’st splashing me all ower, and my feyther’ll noane be so keen o’ giving me a new cloak as thine is, seemingly.’

Sylvia was quiet, not to say penitent, in a moment.  She drew up her feet instantly; and, as if to take herself out of temptation, she turned away from Molly to that side of her stony seat on which the current ran shallow, and broken by pebbles.  But once disturbed in her play, her thoughts reverted to the great subject of the cloak.  She was now as still as a minute before she had been full of frolic and gambolling life.  She had tucked herself up on the stone, as if it had been a cushion, and she a little sultana.