“You need not praise me,” said Ray, almost coldly.  “It is impossible to be quite true, I think.  The nearer you try to come to it, the more you can’t”—­and then she stopped.

“How many changes there have been among us!” she began again, suddenly, at quite a different point, “All through the village there have been things happening, in this last year.  Nobody is at all as they were a year ago.  And another year”—­

“Will tell another year’s story,” said Frank Sunderline.  “Don’t you like to think of that sometimes?  That the story isn’t done, ever?  That there is always more to tell, on and on?  And that means more to do.  We are all making a piece of it.  If we stayed right still, you see,—­why, the Lord might as well shut up the book!”

He was full of life, this young man, and full of the delight of living.  There was something in his calling that made him rejoice in a confident strength.  He was born to handle tools; hammer and chisel were as parts of him.  He builded; he believed in building; in something coming of every stroke.  Real work disposes and qualifies a man to believe in a real destiny,—­a real God.  A carpenter can see that nails are never driven for nothing.  It is the sham work, perhaps, of our day, that shakes faith in purpose and unity; a scrambling, shifty living of men’s own, that makes to their sight a chance huddle and phantasm of creation.

Mrs. Ingraham came down into the room where they were, at this moment, and Dot presently followed.  They began to talk of their plans.  They were going, now, to live with the grandmother in Boston, in Pilgrim Street.

It was a comfortable, plain old house, in a little strip of neighborhood long since left of fashion, and not yet demanded of business; so Mrs. Rhynde could afford to occupy it.  She had used, for many years, to let out a part of her rooms,—­these that the Ingrahams would take,—­in a tenement, as people used to say, making no ambitious distinctions; now, it might be spoken of as “a flat,” or “apartments.”  Everything is “apartments” that is more than a foothold.

The rooms were large, but low.  At the back, they were sunny and airy; they looked through, overlapping a court-way, into Providence Square.  It was a real old Boston homestead, of which so few remain.  There were corner beams and wainscots, some tiled chimney-pieces, even.  It made you think of the pre-Revolutionary days of tea-drinkings, before the tea was thrown overboard.  The step into the front passage was a step down from the street.

Ray and Dot told these things; beguiled into reminiscences of pleasant childish visiting days; Ray, of long domestication in still later years.  It would be a going home, after all.

Leicester Place was only a stone’s throw from Pilgrim Street.  From old Mr. Sparrow’s attic window, you could look across to the Pilgrim Street roofs, and see women hanging out clothes there upon the flat tops of one or two of the houses.  But what of that, in a great city?  Will the Ingrahams ever come across Aunt Blin and bright little Bel Bree?