y to Walter that he was glad to be
seated. Three-fourths of his little figure was hidden under the
table. That was something gained. He was amazed at almost everything
he saw and heard. He folded his hands.

"Do you want to say a grace, little man?" asked the doctor.

"Yes, M'nheer," Walter stammered.

"A good custom. Do you always do that at the table?"

"Yes, always--at warm meals, M'nheer!"

Those children had been taught good manners. Nobody smiled.

Walter bowed his head for a moment; and the doctor took advantage
of the opportunity to give the children a look of warning. They
remembered; and, if afterwards Walter discovered that he had cut a
singular figure in this household, they were not to blame.

"You do well to do it," said Holsma. "We don't do it; and perhaps we
do well not to."

"Certainly," said the mother. "Everyone must act according to his
own conviction."

This simple statement moved Walter more than any of them could have
imagined. He--a conviction! That short sentence of Mevrouw Holsma
attributed to him a dignity and importance that was strange to him,
and gave him a right he had never thought of before. Through the soup
he was thinking continually: "I may have a conviction!"

It never occurred to him that a thing could be interpreted otherwise
than it was interpreted for him by his mother or Stoffel, or some
other grown-up person. The whole question of praying, or not praying,
did not appear so important to him as this new fact, that he could
have a conviction. His heart swelled.

The doctor, who understood Walter, recalled him from his thoughts.

"Everyone must act according to his conviction; and in order to come
to a conviction one has to reflect a long time over the matter. I
am convinced that our little guest would like to eat some of those
peas. Pass them to him, Sietske."

Walter had grasped the import of Holsma's words, and also the meaning
of this transition to the peas. Walter felt--without putting his
feelings into words--that the pedantry of the schoolroom had been put
aside at five o'clock, and that his host merely wanted to give him a
friendly warning against dogmatic bigotry, without tainting the fresh,
wholesome atmosphere of the dining-room.

Despite his shy, retiring nature--or, better, in connection with this
characteristic--Walter was an extremely intelligent boy. This fact
had escaped almost everybody he had come in contact with because of
his lack of self-conf