"Oh, little girl," Alva said, turning, "don't you see that it's charity, and if they really are not what they pretend to be and if it all really is a lie, it may be long before charity will cross their path again?"
"Alva," Lassie said, with her little whimsical smile, "you've taken all that nice, agreeable, aching desire to go to the post-office and see the paper read, completely out of me."
"Well, are you sorry for that?"
Lassie lifted her pretty brown eyes. "No," she said, frankly; "I'm not."
Then she ran down to Ingram and they set forth at once, for it is a long walk to the Lower Falls.
The day was magnificent. The bright autumn sun shone on the lines of steel that glinted beside their way across the bridge, and there was a silvery glisten dancing in all the world of earth and heaven and in the rainbow of the mist, too,—a glisten that bespoke the approach of the Frost King and the further glory soon to be. The glints of brown and yellow here and there amidst the red presaged that Nature's festival was daily drawing nearer to its white close. Ingram, looking ahead towards the trees that hid the little Colonial house, wondered and wondered, but was recalled by Lassie's bursting forth with the whole story of the fresh developments which they had left behind them.
"Oh, by George," Ingram exclaimed; "I'd like to have seen Mrs. Ray get the news myself."
Lassie felt herself fall with a crash back into the pit of ordinary views.
"Would you?" she asked eagerly; "oh, but we couldn't go back now; Alva would be too disgusted."
"Of course we can't go back now, but we've missed a lot of fun."