So they all played and shouted and ran and laughed, while the long, pale-golden spring afternoon stood still, until Mother held up her finger and stopped the game.  “The baby’s awake!” she said, and Father went bounding off.  When he came back with the downy pink morsel, everybody gathered around to see it and exclaim over the tiny fat hands and hungry little rosebud mouth.  “He’s starved!” said Mother.  “He wants his supper, poor little Buddy!  He doesn’t want a lot of people staring at him, do you, Buddy-baby?” She snatched him out of Father’s arms and went off with him, holding him high over her shoulders so that the sunshine shone on his yellow hair, and made a circle of gold around his flushed, sleepy face.  Then everybody picked up books and wraps and note-books and said, “Good-by, ‘Perfessor!’” and went off.

Father and Sylvia and Judith went out in the garden to the hotbed to pick the lettuce for supper and then back in the kitchen to get things ready.  When Mother was through giving Buddy his supper and came hurrying in to help, Sylvia was proud that they had nearly everything done—­all but the omelet.  Father had made cocoa and creamed potatoes—­nobody in the world could make creamed potatoes as good as his—­and Sylvia and Judith had between them, somewhat wranglingly, made the toast and set the table.  Sylvia was sure that Judith was really too little to be allowed to help, but Father insisted that she should try, for he said, with a turn in his voice that made Sylvia aware he was laughing at her, “You only learned through trying, all those many years ago when you were Judith’s age!”

Mother put on one of her big gingham aprons and made the omelet, and they sat down to the table out on the veranda as they always did in warm weather.  In La Chance it begins to be warm enough for outdoor life in April.  Although it was still bright daylight for ever so long after the sun had set, the moon came and looked at them palely over the tops of the trees.

After supper they jumped up to “race through the dishes,” as the family catchword ran.  They tried to beat their record every evening and it was always a lively occasion, with Mother washing like lightning, and Father hurrying to keep up, Sylvia running back and forth to put things away, and Judith bothering ’round, handing out dry dish-towels, and putting away the silver.  She was allowed to handle that because she couldn’t break it.  Mother and Judith worked in a swift silence, but a great deal of talking and laughing went on between Sylvia and her father, while Buddy, from his high-chair where he was watching the others, occasionally broke out in a loud, high crow of delight.  They did it all, even to washing and hanging out the dish-towels, in eleven and a half minutes that evening, Sylvia remembered.