Having made the judge uncomfortable, Dave rendered Winona so by a brief lecture upon organic evolution, with the blue jay as his text.  He said it had taken four hundred and fifty million years for man to progress thus far from the blue-jay stage—­if you could call it progress, the superiority of man’s brain to the jay’s being still inconsiderable.

Winona was uncomfortable, because she had never been able to persuade herself that we had come up from the animals, and in any event it was not talk for the ears of innocent children.  She was relieved when the speaker strayed into the comparatively blameless field of astronomy, telling of suns so vast that our own sun became to them but a pin point of light, and of other worlds out in space peopled with beings like Mrs. Penniman and Winona and the judge, though even here Winona felt that the lecturer was too daring.  The Bible said nothing about these other worlds out in space.  But then Dave had once, in the post office, argued against religion itself in the most daring manner, with none other than the Reverend Mallett.

It was not until the meal ended and they were again on the porch in the summer dusk that Winona made any progress in her criminal investigations.  There, while Dave Cowan played his guitar and sang sentimental ballads to Mrs. Penniman—­these being among the supposed infirmities of the profligate duchess—­Winona drew the twins aside and managed to gain a blurred impression of the day’s tremendous events.  She never did have the thing clearly.  The Merle twin was eager to tell too much, the other determined to tell too little.  But the affair had plainly been less nefarious than reported by Don Paley to Ed Seaver.  The twins persisted in ignoring the social aspects of their adventure.  To them it was a thing of pure finance.

Winona had to give it up at last, for Lyman Teaford came with his flute in its black case.  Dave Cowan finished “In the Gloaming,” brazenly, though it was not thought music by either Lyman or Winona, who would presently dash into the “Poet and Peasant” overture.  The twins begged to be let to see Lyman assemble his flute, and Dave overlooked the process with them.  Lyman deftly joined the various sections of shining metal.

“He looks like a plumber,” said Dave.  The twins giggled, but Winona frowned.

“No respect for God or man,” mumbled the judge from his wicker chair.

CHAPTER IV

In the Penniman home it was not merely Sunday morning; it was Sabbath morning.  Throughout the house a subdued bustling, decorous and solemn; a hushed, religious hurry of preparation for church.  In the bathroom Judge Penniman shaved his marbled countenance with tender solicitude, fitting himself to adorn a sanctuary.  In other rooms Mrs. Penniman and Winona arrayed themselves in choice raiment for behoof of the godly; in each were hurried steppings, as from closet to mirror; shrill whisperings of silken drapery as it fell into place.  In the parlour the Merle twin sat reading an instructive book.  With unfailing rectitude he had been the first to don Sabbath garments, and now lacked merely his shoes, which were being burnished by his brother in the more informal atmosphere of the woodshed, to which the Sabbath strain of preparation did not penetrate.