The family dinner thus honored and celebrated, as all such rituals must be, the various participants walked about a very little while before retiring to their rooms for rest.

Later, Lauretta excused herself from joining the others for supper, declaring that she was not unwell, as she had feared herself to be earlier in the day, but that she believed it would do her good to be quiet in her room until morning, if they would forgive her. They did forgive her, and with spirits freshened by the afternoon rest, Sarah and Leon rejoined their relatives and guests in a quiet but still enjoyable cold supper. Nell had declared that she would only sit with them and take nothing, but Leon, and then Sarah, and indeed Penelope and Felix too, so pressed and encouraged her that she found she was able to eat a morsel or two after all.

In conclusion, after much urging, she allowed Sarah to set a wedge of pumpkin pie before her. Even as she protested that she would not touch it, Leon tilted a pitcher of thick cream over the whole, and when she had done exclaiming her objections, she sighed, picked up a spoon, and saying, “Waste not, want not,” began to consume it.

When they had finished eating, they sat for a little bit of time in companionable stupor, until Sarah began to edge her chair back, and Felix half rose to help her from it.

“Wait!”

Surprised, all turned to Penelope whose command had halted them in their various actions.

“I have only just remembered something,” Penelope said shyly. “Papa—on Thanksgiving Day, offered prayers before every meal, of course, but at the end of the last one, he said another. ‘We thank Thee, Lord, and mayest Thou teach us to be just to ourselves, even as we are to each other.’” When they looked at her smiling, as if waiting for her to conclude, Penelope said, “That’s all of it; I sometimes think he meant one thing; other times, another.”

Nell said, sounding for her a touch impatient, “The directive words would surely seem to be ‘even as’?”

“Ah, who knows,” Sarah said mysteriously, controlling her laughter.

After that everyone hastily scraped chair legs—there was never carpeting in the dining room—and gradually said good night. Nell declared for a period of meditation in her room before sleeping. She would, she allowed, read a chapter or so from the Bible, without which she never moved from home, “not knowing when the Lord will call me to Him.” Perhaps one of the Psalms; they were so comforting when read in the proper spirit. She took a candle from the hallway into the office room and thence up the stairs.