“I want some,” said Monona, eyeing her stonily.  But she found that her hair-ribbon could be pulled forward to meet her lips, and she embarked on the biting of an end.  Lulu departed for some sauce and cake.  It was apple sauce.  Mr. Deacon remarked that the apples were almost as good as if he had stolen them.  He was giving the impression that he was an irrepressible fellow.  He was eating very slowly.  It added pleasantly to his sense of importance to feel that some one, there in the parlour, was waiting his motion.

At length they rose.  Monona flung herself upon her father.  He put her aside firmly, every inch the father.  No, no.  Father was occupied now.  Mrs. Deacon coaxed her away.  Monona encircled her mother’s waist, lifted her own feet from the floor and hung upon her.  “She’s such an active child,” Lulu ventured brightly.

“Not unduly active, I think,” her brother-in-law observed.

He turned upon Lulu his bright smile, lifted his eyebrows, dropped his lids, stood for a moment contemplating the yellow tulip, and so left the room.

Lulu cleared the table.  Mrs. Deacon essayed to wind the clock.  Well now.  Did Herbert say it was twenty-three to-night when it struck the half hour and twenty-one last night, or twenty-one to-night and last night twenty-three?  She talked of it as they cleared the table, but Lulu did not talk.

“Can’t you remember?” Mrs. Deacon said at last.  “I should think you might be useful.”

Lulu was lifting the yellow tulip to set it on the sill.  She changed her mind.  She took the plant to the wood-shed and tumbled it with force upon the chip-pile.

The dining-room table was laid for breakfast.  The two women brought their work and sat there.  The child Monona hung miserably about, watching the clock.  Right or wrong, she was put to bed by it.  She had eight minutes more—­seven—­six—­five—­

Lulu laid down her sewing and left the room.  She went to the wood-shed, groped about in the dark, found the stalk of the one tulip flower in its heap on the chip-pile.  The tulip she fastened in her gown on her flat chest.

Outside were to be seen the early stars.  It is said that if our sun were as near to Arcturus as we are near to our sun, the great Arcturus would burn our sun to nothingness.

* * * * *

In the Deacons’ parlour sat Bobby Larkin, eighteen.  He was in pain all over.  He was come on an errand which civilisation has contrived to make an ordeal.

Before him on the table stood a photograph of Diana Deacon, also eighteen.  He hated her with passion.  At school she mocked him, aped him, whispered about him, tortured him.  For two years he had hated her.  Nights he fell asleep planning to build a great house and engage her as its servant.

Yet, as he waited, he could not keep his eyes from this photograph.  It was Di at her curliest, at her fluffiest, Di conscious of her bracelet, Di smiling.  Bobby gazed, his basic aversion to her hard-pressed by a most reluctant pleasure.  He hoped that he would not see her, and he listened for her voice.