Prayers and special providences! Are these thrust out of the scheme, because there is a scheme, and a steadfastness of administration in God's laws? "No use to pray for rain, or the calming of the storm, or a blessing on the medicine?" When it was all set going, was not the _prayer_ provided for? It was answered a million of years beforehand, in the heart of God, who put it into your heart and nature to pray. Long before the want or the sin, the beseeching for help or for forgiveness was anticipated; provision was made for the undoing or the counteracting of the evil,--the healing of the wrong,--just as it should be longed for in the needing and repenting soul. The more law you have, the more all things come under its foresight. So, under the dear Law,--which is Love, and cares for the sparrow,--came the fair October day, with its unflecked firmament, its golden, conquering warmth, its richness of scent and color; and they two went forth in it. They went early, after dinner; so that the brightness might last them home again; and because the Newriches, in their afternoon drive, might be coming out from the city, perhaps, a little later, to look at their waistcoat-pocket plaything. Mrs. Ingraham turned away from the basement window with a long breath, as 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.