“Oh, well,” Ninian said, “they have to put in parts, I suppose, to catch everybody.  Instead of a song and dance, they do that.”

“And I didn’t understand,” said Ina, “why they all clapped when the principal character ran down front and said something to the audience that time.  But they all did.”

Ninian thought this might have been out of compliment.  Ina wished that Monona might have seen, confessed that the last part was so pretty that she herself would not look; and into Ina’s eyes came their loveliest light.

Lulu sat there, hearing the talk about the play.  “Why couldn’t I have said that?” she thought as the others spoke.  All that they said seemed to her apropos, but she could think of nothing to add.  The evening had been to her a light from heaven—­how could she find anything to say?  She sat in a daze of happiness, her mind hardly operative, her look moving from one to another.  At last Ninian looked at her.

“Sure you liked it, Miss Lulu?”

“Oh, yes!  I think they all took their parts real well.”

It was not enough.  She looked at them appealingly, knowing that she had not said enough.

“You could hear everything they said,” she added.  “It was—­” she dwindled to silence.

Dwight Herbert savoured his rarebit with a great show of long wrinkled dimples.

“Excellent sauces they make here—­excellent,” he said, with the frown of an epicure.  “A tiny wee bit more Athabasca,” he added, and they all laughed and told him that Athabasca was a lake, of course.  Of course he meant tobasco, Ina said.  Their entertainment and their talk was of this sort, for an hour.

“Well, now,” said Dwight Herbert when it was finished, “somebody dance on the table.”

“Dwightie!”

“Got to amuse ourselves somehow.  Come, liven up.  They’ll begin to read the funeral service over us.”

“Why not say the wedding service?” asked Ninian.

In the mention of wedlock there was always something stimulating to Dwight, something of overwhelming humour.  He shouted a derisive endorsement of this proposal.

“I shouldn’t object,” said Ninian.  “Should you, Miss Lulu?”

Lulu now burned the slow red of her torture.  They were all looking at her.  She made an anguished effort to defend herself.

“I don’t know it,” she said, “so I can’t say it.”

Ninian leaned toward her.

“I, Ninian, take thee, Lulu, to be my wedded wife,” he pronounced.  “That’s the way it goes!”

“Lulu daren’t say it!” cried Dwight.  He laughed so loudly that those at the near tables turned.  And, from the fastness of her wifehood and motherhood, Ina laughed.  Really, it was ridiculous to think of Lulu that way....

Ninian laughed too.  “Course she don’t dare say it,” he challenged.

From within Lulu, that strange Lulu, that other Lulu who sometimes fought her battles, suddenly spoke out: