something!" agreed
Marise.

She stood up. "I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness like the
rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of
everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the
baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the others, beginning to
stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. "I'll call the
children. And Neale will be here in a moment."

* * * * *

She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the grape-arbor,
still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green. She was calling,
"Children! _Children!_ Come and help with the supper."

She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of intense quiet,
in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun poured a flood of
palpable gold on the three motionless figures in the garden.

* * * * *

Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the largest of
the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets, a pail, an
ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about them, wrought to
exaltation by the complicated smell of the eatables.

"Neale was just coming in the front gate," she explained, as he nodded
familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's cheek. "Cousin
Hetty, just _look_ at Elly in that night-cap of Great-aunt Pauline's.
Doesn't she look the image of that old daguerreotype of Grandmother? See
here, Mark, who said you could trail that sword out here? That belongs
in the attic."

"Oh, let him, let him," said Cousin Hetty peaceably.

"There's nothing much less breakable than a sword. He can't hurt it."

"I've woren it lots of times before," said Mark. "Aunt Hetty always let
me to. Favver, won't you 'trap it tight to me, so's I won't 'traddle it
so much."

"Mother," said Elly, coming up close to Marise, as she stood unpacking
the dishes, "I was looking inside that old diary, the one in the red
leather cover, your grandmother's, I guess, the diary she wrote when she
was a young lady. And she was having a perfectly dreadful time whether
she could believe the Doctrine of the Trinity. She seemed to feel so bad
about it. She wrote how she couldn't sleep nights, and cried, and
everything. It was the Holy Ghost she couldn't make any sense out of.
Mother, what in the world _is_ the Doctrine of the Trinity?

"For mercy's sakes!" cried Cousin Hetty. "I never saw such a fam