The bakery was shut up.  The shop and house-blinds were closed upon the street.  The bright little garden at the back was gay with summer color; roses, geraniums, balsams, candytuft; crimson and purple, and white and scarlet flashed up everywhere.  But Mrs. Ingraham had on a plain muslin cap, instead of a ribboned one such as she was used to wear; and Dot was in a black calico dress; they sat in the kitchen window together, ripping up some breadths of faded cloth that they were going to send to the dye-house.  Ray was in the front room, looking over papers.  Mrs. Ingraham’s name appeared in the notices, but Ray really did the work, all except the signing of the necessary documents.

Everything was very different here, the moment Joseph Ingraham’s breath was gone from his body.  Everything that had stood in his name stood now in the name of an “estate.”  Large or small, an estate has always to be settled.  There had been a man already applying to buy out the remainder of the bakery lease,—­house and all.  He was ready to take it for eight years, including the one it had yet to run in the present occupancy; he would pay them a considerable bonus for relinquishing this and the goodwill.

Ray had stood at the helm and brought the vessel to port; that was different from undertaking another voyage.  She did not see that she had any right to hazard her mother’s and sister’s little means, and incur further risks which she had not actual capital to meet, for the ambition, or even possible gain, of carrying on a business.  She understood it perfectly; she could have done it; she could, perhaps, have worked out some of her own new ideas; if she and Dot had been brothers, instead of sisters, it would very likely have been what they would have done.  There was enough to pay all debts and leave them upwards of a thousand dollars apiece.  But Ray sat down and thought it all over.  She remembered that they were women, and she saw how that made all the difference.

“Suppose either of us should wish to marry?  Dot might, at any rate.”

That was the way she said it to herself.  She really thought of Dot especially and first; for it would be her doing if her sister were bound and hampered in any way; and even though Dot were willing, could she see clear to decide upon an undertaking that would involve the seven best years of the child’s life, in which “who knew what might happen?”

She did not look straight in the face her own possibilities, yet she said simply in her own mind, “A woman ought to leave room for that.  It might be cheating some one else, as well as herself, if she didn’t.”  And she saw very well that a woman could not marry and assume family ties, with a seven years’ lease of a bakehouse and a seven years’ business on her hands.  “Why—­he might be a—­anything,” was the odd little wording with which she mentally exclaimed at this point of her considerations.  And if he were anything,—­anything