Meanwhile, what of Ray Ingraham?

Ray Ingraham was sweet, and proper, and still; just what Frank Sunderline thought was prettiest and nicest for a woman to be.  He was always reminded by her ways of what it would be so pretty and nice for Marion Kent to be.  But Marion would sparkle; and it is so hard to be still and sparkle too.  He liked the brightness and the airiness; a little of it, near to; he did not like a whole car-full, or room-full, or street full,—­he did not like to see a woman sparkle all round.

Mr. Ingraham had come into Dorbury Upper Village some half dozen years since; had leased the bakery, house, and shop; and two years afterward, Rachel had come home to stay.  She had been left in Boston with her grandmother when the family had moved out of the city, that she might keep on a while with the school that she was used to and stood so well in; with her Chapel classes, also, where she heard literature and history lectures, each once a week.  Ray could not bear to leave them, nor to give up her Sunday lessons in the dear old Mission Rooms.  Dot was three years younger; she could begin again anywhere, and their mother could not spare both.  Besides, “what Ray got she could always be giving to Dot afterwards.”  That is not so easy, and by no means always follows.  Dot turned out the mother’s girl,—­the girl of the village, as was said; practical, comfortable, pleasant, capable, sensible.  Ray was something of all these, with a touch of more; alive in a higher nature, awakened to receive through upper channels, sensitive to some things that neither pleased nor troubled Mrs. Ingraham and Dot.

It took a good while to come to know a girl like Ray Ingraham; most of her young acquaintance felt the step up that they must take to stand fairly beside her, or come intimately near.  Frank Sunderline felt it too, in certain ways, and did not suppose that she could see in him more than he saw in himself:  a plain fellow, good at his trade, or going to be; bright enough to know brightness in other people when he came across it, and with enough of what, independent of circumstances, goes to the essential making of a gentleman, to perceive and be attracted by the delicate gentleness that makes a lady.

That was just what Ray Ingraham did see; only he hardly set it down in his self-estimate at its full value.

Do you perceive, story-reader, story-raveller, that Frank Sunderline was not quite in love with either of these girls?  Do you see that it is not a matter of course that he should be?

I can tell you, you girls who make a romance out of the first word, and who can tell from the first chapter how it will all end, that you will make great mistakes if you go to interpreting life so,—­your own, or anybody’s else.