She turned away and commenced a kitten-like frolic with Bill, who was always only too happy to second any of her motions, and readily promised that after supper she would go with him a walk of half a mile over to a neighbor’s, where was a corn-husking.  A great golden lamp of a harvest moon was already coming up in the fading flush of the evening sky, and she promised herself much amusement in watching the result of her maneuver on James.

“He’ll see at any rate that I am not waiting his beck and call.  Next time, if he wants my company he can ask for it in season.  I’m not going to indulge him in sulks, not I. These college fellows worry over books till they hurt their digestion, and then have the blues and look as if the world was coming to an end.”  And Diana went to the looking-glass and rearranged the spray of golden-rod in her hair and nodded at herself defiantly, and then turned to help get on the supper.

The Pitkin folk that night sat down to an ample feast, over which the impending Thanksgiving shed its hilarity.  There was not only the inevitable great pewter platter, scoured to silver brightness, in the center of the table, and piled with solid masses of boiled beef, pork, cabbage and all sorts of vegetables, and the equally inevitable smoking loaf of rye and Indian bread, to accompany the pot of baked pork and beans, but there were specimens of all the newly-made Thanksgiving pies filling every available space on the table.  Diana set special value on herself as a pie artist, and she had taxed her ingenuity this year to invent new varieties, which were received with bursts of applause by the boys.  These sat down to the table in democratic equality,—­Biah Carter and Abner with all the sons of the family, old and young, each eager, hungry and noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon.  For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors.  As Biah Carter afterwards remarked of that night, “You could feel there was thunder in the air somewhere round.  The deacon had got on about his longest face, and when the deacon’s face is about down to its wust, why, it would stop a robin singin’—­there couldn’t nothin’ stan’ it.”

To-night the severely cut lines of his face had even more than usual of haggard sternness, and the handsome features of James beside him, in their fixed gravity, presented that singular likeness which often comes out between father and son in seasons of mental emotion.  Diana in vain sought to draw a laugh from her cousin.  In pouring his home-brewed beer she contrived to spatter him, but he wiped it off without a smile, and let pass in silence some arrows of raillery that she had directed at his somber face.