s 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?

In the book that binds up this story, there is but the turn of a
leaf between them. A great many of us may be as near as that to each
other in the telling of the world's story, who never get the leaf
turned over, or between whom the chapters are divided, with never a
connecting word.

The Ingrahams moved into Boston in the early summer. It was July
when Bel came down from the hill-country with Aunt Blin.

CHAPTER IX.

INHERITANCE.

Do you remember somebody else wh