s they drove off.

"Well, I suppose _that's_ settled," she said, with the
mother-sadness, in the midst of the not wishing it by any means to
be otherwise, inflecting her voice.

"I don't believe Ray thinks so," said Dot.

In some of the hundred little indirect ways that girls find the use
of, Ray had managed to really impose this impression upon the sturdy
mind of Dot, without discussion. If Dot had had the least bit of
experience of her own, as yet, she would not have been imposed upon.
But Mrs. Ingraham had great reliance on Dorothy's common sense, and
she left no lee-way for uninitiation.

"Do you really mean to say, child," she asked, turning round
sharply, "that Ray don't suppose,--or don't want,--or don't
intend--? She's a goose if she don't, then; and they're both geese;
and I shouldn't have any patience with 'em! And that's _my_ mind
about it!"

It is not such a very beautiful drive straight out to Pomantic over
the Roxeter road. There are more attractive ones in many directions.
But no drive out of Boston is destitute of beauty; and even the long
turnpike stretches--they are turnpike stretches still, though the
Pike is turned into an Avenue, and built all along with blocks of
little houses, exactly alike, in those places where used to be the
flat, unoccupied intervals between the scattered suburban
residences--have their breaks of hill and orchard and garden, and
their glimpses across the marshes, of the sea.

Ray enjoyed every bit of it,--even the rows of new tenements with
their wooden door-steps, and their disproportionate Mansard roofs
that make them all look like the picture in "Mother Goose," of the
boy under a big hat that might be slid down over him and just cover
him up.

The rhyme itself came into Ray's head, and she said it to her
companion.

"Little lad, little lad, where were you born?
Far off in Lancashire, under a thorn,
Where they sup buttermilk from a ram's horn;
And a pumpkin scooped, with a yellow rim,
Is the bonny bowl they breakfast in."

"Those houses make me think of that," she said; "and the picture
over it--do you remember?"

Everybody remembers "Mother Goose." You can't quote or remind amiss
from her.

"To be sure," Frank answered, laughing. "And the histories and the
lives there carry out the idea. They all came from Lancashire, or
somewhere across the big sea, and they were all born under the
thorn, pretty much,-