Others followed, and the remainder waited on the steps of the emporium, with Aunt Mary and Polly, for Matthew and Bess to come for them.  It was hard for them to realize that the powerful engines in both cars would take them into town in little over an hour, when the journey as they before had made it had always consumed six, and they were becoming impatient even before we left.  So when we met Bess and Matthew half an hour later down the Riverfield ribbon, I hurried them back.  I afterwards learned that they had had to persuade Mrs. Spain to reclothe herself in the pink foulard, because she had decided that they were not coming and had gone back to work.

In reality I didn’t draw a perfectly free breath until I saw the entire population of Riverfield seated in advantageous seats on the middle aisle in the town hall at six-thirty, and beginning to get out their lunch-baskets to feed themselves and the kiddies before the opening of the convocation at eight o’clock.

According to the advice of Mrs. Addcock and Mrs. Tillett herself, I had taken a stuffed egg, a chicken wing, and a slice of jelly-cake for my own supper, along with Baby Tillett’s bag of hard biscuits, over on a side aisle, and from that vantage-point I could see the whole party.

“They are lovely—­the loveliest of all, mine are,” I said to myself as I surveyed them proudly and compared them with other lunching delegations, which I knew to be from Providence and Hillsboro and Cloverbend.

Baby Tillett crowed a proud assent as he stuck a biscuit in his mouth and looked at the lights with the greatest pleasure.  I took off his new cap with its two blue bows over the ears, unbuttoned his little pique coat, which I had almost entirely built myself, and which was of excellent cut, and settled down to dine with him in contentment.

Then it happened that I was so weary from the day of excitement that I had hardly finished my supper before I snuggled Baby Tillett closer in my arms, as I felt him grow limp very suddenly, and with him I drifted off into a nap.  I was sitting in a corner seat, but I don’t yet see how I slept as I did and cuddled him too unless it was just the force of natural maternal gravitation that held my arms firmly around him, but the first thing I knew I opened my eyes on the whole hall full of people, who were wildly applauding the governor as he stepped forward on the platform.  Hurriedly straightening my drooping head and looking guiltily around to see if I had been caught napping, I discovered Matthew Berry at my side in a broad chuckle, and I immediately suspected his stalwart right arm of being that force of gravitation.

“He’s dead to the world; let him lie across your knees and listen to the governor’s heroics of introduction to Baldwin,” said Matthew as he settled the limp baby across my lap with his bobbing head on my arm.  And he adjusted his own arm less conspicuously along the seat at my back.