He was courtly but maintained his distance. He and Mamzelle had never been intimate. He was ill at ease with her boarding-school manners and extravagant speech, and regarded her as a harmless old dodo. In the old days, when the children were small, she had been jealous of him, had attached herself to Christina with the implacable strength of a limpet to a rock, and appeared to feel that a husband was simply a burden sent by God.

Cornelius looked at his watch—past two. He felt hungry and tired.

And as if she guessed it, as if she felt his loneliness only for her in the midst of the voluble, overwhelming family, Christina was at his side, her hand on his shoulder, bending to kiss the back of his neck and whisper, “We’re all ready, darling. Marianne and Olivia have taken over—chased me out of the kitchen!”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

“Ravenous—so am I.” The words meant nothing. But they rested for a moment in each other.

And then it was time to walk into the dining room—Christina on Bruno’s arm, for he was to sit at the head of the table—all singing “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing” as they went in, not in a hurly-burly but quietly because they were singing. So it had always been. It was a hard moment for Cornelius, left high and dry with Mamzelle while all the life and the laughter were across the hall in the next room.

“Champagne!” Cathy cried. “Great!”

While Bruno carved and Alan poured the Burgundy and Cathy and Comfort passed the vegetables, John asked for their attention, and Cornelius leaned forward to hear.

“Listen to John.” Christina quelled the din. “He has a tale to tell.”

“Not exactly a tale—something Old Pete told me—I thought it might interest you. Did you ever hear of the turkey round-up?”

“Did it happen around here?” Robin asked.

“Around here and all over New Hampshire.”

“Tell!” Comfort demanded.

And while Bruno carved and sent plates down, John described the round-up—how weeks before Thanksgiving the turkeys were gathered and walked in a slowly increasing multitude from distant farms to Faneuil Hall in Boston to be sold.

“A river of turkeys,” Cathy murmured.

“More turkeys, Pete said, than there were cattle in the West.” John was warming to his tale. “How to water them? Where to stop for the night?—Nowhere near house or barn, for if a hundred or a thousand twenty-pound birds tried to roost on a barn roof it would collapse. Imagine their arrival in Boston—all traffic stopped, children standing on the street corners to watch this nervous, gobbling parade of birds pour into town!”

“It sounds horrible,” Cathy said. “Those poor birds!”

“They’re really so stupid,” said Christy, “no one can waste pity on any member of the hen or turkey tribe.”