“Why, it is prettier than it ever was at the old place; isn’t it Sabina?  It’s full and perfect; and that was always a great barrenness of glass.  The street can’t stare in now.  I think mother will be able to forget that there is even a street at all.”

“It’s real nobby,” said Sabina.

The room was all soft green and gray:  green rep chairs and sofa, green topped library table; green piano cover; green inside blinds; a green velvet grape leaf border around the gray papered walls.

Sabina, though a very elegant housemaid, patronized and approved cheerfully.  She was satisfied with the new home.  There had not been a word of leaving since it was decided upon.  She had her reasons.  Sabina was “promised to be married” next spring.  Dignity in her profession was not so much of an object meantime, nor even wages; she had laid up money and secured her standing, living always in the first families; she could afford to take it in a quiet way; “it wouldn’t be so bothering nor so dressy;” Sabina had a saving turn with her best things, that spared both trouble and money.  Besides, her kitchen windows and the back door suited her; they looked across a bit of unoccupied land to the back street where the cabinet-shop buildings were.  Sabina was going to marry into the veneering profession.

CHAPTER VI.

A LONG CHAPTER OF A WHOLE YEAR.

Mr. Ingraham, the baker, did not die that day when the doctor’s chaise stood at the door, and all the children in the village were sent in for brick loaves.  He was only struck down helpless; to lie there and be waited on; to linger, and wonder why he lingered; to feel himself in the way, and a burden; to get used to all this, and submit to it, and before he died to see that it had been all right.

The bakery lease had yet two years to run.  It might have been sold out, but that would have involved a breaking up and a move, which Ingraham himself was not fit to bear, and his wife and daughters were not willing to think of yet.

Rachel quietly said,—­as soon as her father was so far restored and comfortable that he could think and speak of things with them,—­

“I can go on with the bakehouse.  I know how.  The men will all stay.  I spoke to them Saturday night.”

Ray kept the accounts, and when Saturday night came, the first after the misfortune fell upon them, she called all the journeymen into the little bakery office, where she sat upon the high stool at her father’s desk.  She gave each his week’s wages, asking each one, as he signed his name in receipt, to wait a minute.  Then she told them all, that she meant, if her father consented, to keep on with the business.

“He may get well,” she said.  “Will you all stand by and help me?”

“’Deed and we wull,” said Irish Martin, the newest, the smallest, and the stupidest—­if a quick heart and a willing will can be stupid—­of them all.  Some stupidity is only brightness not properly hitched on.