Kenneth Kincaid had been modestly listening to the older gentlemen, and now and then venturing to inquire or remark something, with an intelligence that attracted Mr. Geoffrey; and presently it came out that he had been south with the army; and then Mr. Geoffrey asked questions of him, and they got upon Reconstruction business, and comparing facts and exchanging conclusions, quite as if one was not a mere youth with only his eyes and his brains and his conscience to help him in his first grapple with the world in the tangle and crisis at which he found it, and the other a grave, practiced, keen-judging man, the counsellor of national leaders.

After all, they had no business to bring the great, troublesome, heavy-weighted world into a child’s party.  I wish man never would; though it did not happen badly, as it all turned out, that they did a little of it in this instance.  If they had thought of it, “Crambo” was good for them too, for a change; and presently they did think of it; for Dorris called out in distress, real or pretended, from the table,—­

“Kentie, here’s something you must really take off my hands!  I haven’t the least idea what to do with it.”

And then came a cry from Hazel,—­

“No fair!  We’re all just as badly off, and there isn’t one of us that has got a brother to turn to.  Here’s another for Mr. Kincaid.”

“There are plenty more.  Come, Mr. Oldways, Mr. Geoffrey, won’t you try ‘Crambo?’ There’s a good deal in it, as there is in most nonsense.”

“We’ll come and see what it is,” said Mr. Geoffrey; and so the chairs were drawn up, and the gray, grave heads looked on over the young ones.

“Why, Hazel’s got through!” said Lois, scratching violently at her paper, and obliterating three obstinate lines.

“O, I didn’t bother, you see!  I just stuck the word right in, like a pin into a pincushion, and let it go.  There wasn’t anything else to do with it.”

“I’ve got to make my pincushion,” said Dorris.

“I should think you had!  Look at her!  She’s writing her paper all over!  O, my gracious, she must have done it before!”

“Mother and Mr. Geoffrey are doing heaps, too!  We shall have to publish a book,” said Diana, biting the end of her pencil, and taking it easy.  Diana hardly ever got the rhymes made in time; but then she always admired everybody’s else, which was a good thing for somebody to be at leisure to do.

“Uncle Oldways and Lilian are folding up,” said Hazel.

“Five minutes more,” said Miss Craydocke, keeping the time with her watch before her.  “Hush!”

When the five minutes were rapped out, there were seven papers to be read.  People who had not finished this time might go on when the others took fresh questions.

Hazel began reading, because she had been ready first.

“‘What is the difference between sponge-cake and doughnuts?’ ‘Hallelujah.’”