He had come round behind her chair, where she had seated herself at her sewing.

“It’s pleasant out of town these fall days; and I want you to see my house before I give it over.  If I come for you to-morrow, will you ride out with me to Pomantic?”

Ray felt half a dozen things at that moment between his question and her reply.  She felt her mother’s eyes just lifted at her, without another movement, over the silver rims of her spectacles; she felt Dot’s utter stillness; she felt her own heart spring with a single quick beat, and her cheeks grow warm, and a moisture at her fingers’ ends as they held work and needle determinedly, and she set two or three stitches with instinctive resolution of not stopping.  She felt, inwardly, the certainty that this would count for much in Mrs. Ingraham’s plain, old-fashioned way of judging things; she was afraid of a misjudgment for Frank Sunderline, if he did not, perhaps, mean anything particular by it; she would have refused him ten times over, and let the refusal rest with her, sooner than have him blamed; for what business had she, after all,—­

“Well, Ray?”

She felt his hand upon the back of her chair, close to her shoulder; she felt that he leaned down a little.  She heard something in that “Well, Ray,” that she could not turn aside, though in an hour afterward she would be taking herself to task that she had let it seem like “anything.”

“I was thinking,” she said, quietly.  “Yes, I think I could go.  Thank you, Frank.”

Frank Sunderline was not sure, as he walked up Roulstone Street afterward, whether Ray cared much.  She made it seem all matter of course, in a minute, with that calm, deliberate answer of hers.  And she sat so still, and let him go out of the room with hardly another word or look.  She never stopped sewing, either.

Well,—­he did not see those ten stitches!  He might not have been the wiser if he had.  They were not carpenter-work.

But Ray knew better than to pick them out, while her mother and Dot were by.

That next day was made for them.

Days are made for separate people, though they shine or storm over so many.  Or the people are drifted into the right days; what is the difference?

I must stop for the thought here, that has to do with this question of rain and shine,—­with need, and asking, and giving.

Prayers and special providences!  Are these thrust out of the scheme, because there is a scheme, and a steadfastness of administration in God’s laws?  “No use to pray for rain, or the calming of the storm, or a blessing on the medicine?” When it was all set going, was not the prayer provided for?  It was answered a million of years beforehand, in the heart of God, who put it into your heart and nature to pray.  Long before the want or the sin, the beseeching for help or for forgiveness was anticipated; provision was made for the undoing or the counteracting of the evil,—­the healing of the wrong,—­just as it should be longed for in the needing and repenting soul.  The more law you have, the more all things come under its foresight.