A neighborly looking woman--such a woman as always "steps in" on an emergency--met her at the entrance. "He's dreadful sick, I'm afraid, dear," she said, reaching out and putting her hand on Ray's shoulder. "The doctor's up-stairs; ben there an hour. And I believe my soul every identical child in the village's ben sent in for a brick loaf." Marion and Sunderline kept on down the Underhill road. The conversation was broken off. It was a startling occurrence that had interrupted it; but it does not need startling occurrences to turn aside the chance of talk just when one would have said something that one was most anxious to say. A very little straw will do it. It is like a game at croquet. The ball you want to hit lies close; but it is not quite your turn; a play intervenes; and before you can be allowed your strike the whole attitude and aspect are changed. Nothing lies where it did a minute before. You yourself are driven off, and forced into different combinations. Marion wanted to try Sunderline with certain new notions--certain half-purposes of her own, in the latter part of this walk they would have together. Everything had led nicely up to it; when here, just at the moment of her opportunity, it became impossible to go on from where they were. An event had thrust itself in. It was not seemly to disregard it. They could not help thinking of the Ingrahams. And yet, "if it would have done," Marion Kent could have put off her sympathies, made her own little point, and then gone back to the sympathies again, just as really and truly, ten minutes afterward. They would have kept. Why are things jostled up so? "I am sorry for Ray," she said, presently. Frank Sunderline, with a grave look, nodded his head thoughtfully, twice. "If anything happens to Mr. Ingraham, won't it be strange that I should have asked her what I did, just that minute?" "What? O, yes!" It had fairly been jostled out of the young man's mind. They walked on silently again. But Marion could not give it up. "I don't doubt she _would_ be a baker; carry on the whole concern,--if there was money. She keeps all her father's accounts, now." "Does she?" "She wouldn't have had the chance if there had been a boy. That's what I say isn't fair." "I think you are mistaken. You can't change the way of the world. There isn't anything to hinder a woman's doing work like that,--even going on with it, as you say,--when it is set for her by special circumstances. It's natural, and a duty; and the world will treat her well and think the more of her. Things are so that it is getting easier every day for it to be done. The facilities of the times can't help serving women as much as men. But people won't generally bring up their daughters to the work or the prospects that they do their sons, simply because they can't depend upon them in the same way afterwards. If a girl marries,--and she ought to if she can _right_,"-- "And what if she _has_ to, if she can, wrong?"