The Wilbur twin was puzzled by this and would have preferred that his present be devoted solely to making a new man of Judge Penniman, but he laughed loyally with his father, and rejoiced when Mrs. Penniman, in the character of the abandoned duchess, put her own lips to the glass at his father’s urging.  The judge did not enter into this spirit of foolery, resenting, indeed, that a sound medicinal compound should be thus impugned.  And Winona was even more severe.  Not for her to-day were jests about Madame la Marquise and her heart of adamant.  Dave Cowan tried a few of these without result.

Winona was still silent with importance, or spoke cryptically, and she lavished upon the Merle twin such attention as she could give from her own mysterious calculations.  One might have gathered that she was beholding the Merle twin in some high new light.  The Wilbur twin ate silently and as unobtrusively as he could, for table manners were especially watched by Winona on Sunday.  Not until the blackberry pie did he break into speech, and even then, it appeared, not with the utmost felicity.  His information that these here blackberries had been picked off the grave of some old Jonas Whipple up in the burying ground caused him to be regarded coldly by more than one of those about the table; and Winona wished to be told how many times she had asked him not to say “these here.”  Of course he couldn’t tell her.

Dinner over, it appeared that Winona would take Merle with her to call upon poor old Mrs. Dodwell, who had been bedridden for twenty years, but was so patient with it all.  She loved to have Merle sit by her bedside of a Sunday and tell of the morning’s sermon.  They would also take her a custard.  The Wilbur twin was not invited upon this excursion, but his father winked at him when it was mentioned and he was happy.  He could in no manner have edified the afflicted Mrs. Dodwell, and the wink meant that he would go with his father for a walk over the hills—­perhaps to the gypsy camp.  So he winked back at his father, being no longer in Sunday-school, and was impatient to be off.

In the little house he watched from a window until Winona and Merle had gone on their errand of mercy—­Merle carrying nicely the bowl of custard swathed in a napkin—­and thereupon heartily divested himself of shoes and stockings.  Winona, for some reason she could never make apparent to him, believed that boys could not decently go barefoot on the Lord’s Day.  He did not wish to affront her, but neither would he wear shoes and stockings with no one to make him.  His bare feet rejoiced at the cool touch of the grass as he waited in the front yard for his father.  He would have liked to change his Sunday clothes for the old ones of a better feel, but this even he felt would be going too far.  You had to draw the line somewhere.

His father came out, lighting his calabash pipe.  He wore a tweed cap now in place of the formal derby, but he was otherwise attired as on the previous evening, in the blue coal and vivid waistcoat, the inferior trousers, and the undesirable shoes.  As they went down the street under shading elms the dog, Frank, capered at the end of his taut leash.