“I hope we’ll be all together, wherever we are,” said Cecily gently.  “Nothing can be so very bad then.”

“I’m going to read the Bible all to-morrow forenoon,” said Peter.

When Aunt Olivia came out to go home the Story Girl asked her permission to stay all night with Felicity and Cecily.  Aunt Olivia assented lightly, swinging her hat on her arm and including us all in a friendly smile.  She looked very pretty, with her big blue eyes and warm-hued golden hair.  We loved Aunt Olivia; but just now we resented her having laughed at us with Aunt Janet, and we refused to smile back.

“What a sulky, sulky lot of little people,” said Aunt Olivia, going away across the yard, holding her pretty dress up from the dewy grass.

Peter resolved to stay all night with us, too, not troubling himself about anybody’s permission.  When we went to bed it was settling down for a stormy night, and the rain was streaming wetly on the roof, as if the world, like Sara Ray, were weeping because its end was so near.  Nobody forgot or hurried over his prayers that night.  We would dearly have loved to leave the candle burning, but Aunt Janet’s decree regarding this was as inexorable as any of Mede and Persia.  Out the candle must go; and we lay there, quaking, with the wild rain streaming down on the roof above us, and the voices of the storm wailing through the writhing spruce trees.

CHAPTER XX.  THE JUDGMENT SUNDAY

Sunday morning broke, dull and gray.  The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung dark and brooding above a world which, in its windless calm, following the spent storm-throe, seemed to us to be waiting “till judgment spoke the doom of fate.”  We were all up early.  None of us, it appeared, had slept well, and some of us not at all.  The Story Girl had been among the latter, and she looked very pale and wan, with black shadows under her deep-set eyes.  Peter, however, had slept soundly enough after twelve o’clock.

“When you’ve been stumping out elderberries all the afternoon it’ll take more than the Judgment Day to keep you awake all night,” he said.  “But when I woke up this morning it was just awful.  I’d forgot it for a moment, and then it all came back with a rush, and I was worse scared than before.”

Cecily was pale but brave.  For the first time in years she had not put her hair up in curlers on Saturday night.  It was brushed and braided with Puritan simplicity.

“If it’s the Judgment Day I don’t care whether my hair is curly or not,” she said.

“Well,” said Aunt Janet, when we all descended to the kitchen, “this is the first time you young ones have ever all got up without being called, and that’s a fact.”

At breakfast our appetites were poor.  How could the grown-ups eat as they did?  After breakfast and the necessary chores there was the forenoon to be lived through.  Peter, true to his word, got out his Bible and began to read from the first chapter in Genesis.