So, under the dear Law,—­which is Love, and cares for the sparrow,—­came the fair October day, with its unflecked firmament, its golden, conquering warmth, its richness of scent and color; and they two went forth in it.

They went early, after dinner; so that the brightness might last them home again; and because the Newriches, in their afternoon drive, might be coming out from the city, perhaps, a little later, to look at their waistcoat-pocket plaything.

Mrs. Ingraham turned away from the basement window with a long breath, as they drove off.

“Well, I suppose that’s settled,” she said, with the mother-sadness, in the midst of the not wishing it by any means to be otherwise, inflecting her voice.

“I don’t believe Ray thinks so,” said Dot.

In some of the hundred little indirect ways that girls find the use of, Ray had managed to really impose this impression upon the sturdy mind of Dot, without discussion.  If Dot had had the least bit of experience of her own, as yet, she would not have been imposed upon.  But Mrs. Ingraham had great reliance on Dorothy’s common sense, and she left no lee-way for uninitiation.

“Do you really mean to say, child,” she asked, turning round sharply, “that Ray don’t suppose,—­or don’t want,—­or don’t intend—?  She’s a goose if she don’t, then; and they’re both geese; and I shouldn’t have any patience with ’em!  And that’s my mind about it!”

It is not such a very beautiful drive straight out to Pomantic over the Roxeter road.  There are more attractive ones in many directions.  But no drive out of Boston is destitute of beauty; and even the long turnpike stretches—­they are turnpike stretches still, though the Pike is turned into an Avenue, and built all along with blocks of little houses, exactly alike, in those places where used to be the flat, unoccupied intervals between the scattered suburban residences—­have their breaks of hill and orchard and garden, and their glimpses across the marshes, of the sea.

Ray enjoyed every bit of it,—­even the rows of new tenements with their wooden door-steps, and their disproportionate Mansard roofs that make them all look like the picture in “Mother Goose,” of the boy under a big hat that might be slid down over him and just cover him up.

The rhyme itself came into Ray’s head, and she said it to her companion.

“Little lad, little lad, where were you born? 
Far off in Lancashire, under a thorn,
Where they sup buttermilk from a ram’s horn;
And a pumpkin scooped, with a yellow rim,
Is the bonny bowl they breakfast in.”

“Those houses make me think of that,” she said; “and the picture over it—­do you remember?”

Everybody remembers “Mother Goose.”  You can’t quote or remind amiss from her.

“To be sure,” Frank answered, laughing.  “And the histories and the lives there carry out the idea.  They all came from Lancashire, or somewhere across the big sea, and they were all born under the thorn, pretty much,—­of poverty and pinches.  But they sup their buttermilk, and the bowl is bonny, if it is only a pumpkin rind.  Isn’t that rhyme just the perfection of the glorifying of common things by imagination?”