"Pony," cried Miss Gastonguay, with a furiously red face, and jigging at the lines, "will you get up?"
The pony, however, had found some delectable morsel in the gutter, and while nosing it refused to budge, thereby forcing his mistress to listen to the tide of Aurelia's eloquence, which was not easily stopped.
"When there is sickness or death," she went on, rapidly, "who is first at the bedside? Always Miss Gastonguay. She pretends not to care,--she laughs at the ministers and rarely goes to church,--but she is, I verily believe, one of the best Christians in the town. She obeys the commands of Christ,--some day she will own herself a humble follower of the One who came to minister to the lowly."
"Pony," cried Miss Gastonguay, in despair, "now I am going to beat you for the first time in my life," and leaning over the dashboard she whacked him so soundly with her umbrella that, after giving one startled glance behind, he fled madly down the street, overturning a heap of tin pans on the curbstone, and frightening a number of people who fancied that a runaway was upon them.
Derrice, clutching her hat, gave one glance behind, and saw Aurelia still standing on the sidewalk, her hand outstretched, her lips moving, her attitude that of an inspired prophetess.
Miss Gastonguay's face was still red to her ears, and she did not speak until they had passed several churches, two schoolhouses, a theatre, many shops, and the city hall, and had entered on a road bordered by shabby houses. Then she waved her hand, and said, briefly, "Our neighbours, the mill hands, the most honest people in town, but, like the Gastonguays, not fashionable; and there is our house," she went on, when they reached a place where four roads met, and the car line stopped.
"You have a charming situation," replied Derrice, keenly interested in the long, narrow house, built after the fashion of a French château.
"Not according to the Rossignol people. It is the thing to live down the river, up on Blaine Street where you do, or across it, as near the Potts as they will let you. No one lives up here but ourselves and the poor cottagers who work in the mills farther up. But then the Gastonguays never do things like other people," and she admonished the pony to take them through the gates of the avenue, instead of stopping short and staring into the cart, to see if he could find an explanation for the unexpected blow he had received in the town.