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.