"Gracious me, Marise!" warned her old cousin. "I know you're only running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going pretty far when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and things. I don't believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very well."
"He wouldn't mind," demurred Marise. "He'd think it an interesting historical parallel."
"Mrs. Bayweather would have a thing or two to say."
"Right you are. _Mrs._ Bayweather would certainly say something!" agreed Marise.
She stood up. "I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness like the rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the others, beginning to stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. "I'll call the children. And Neale will be here in a moment."
She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the grape-arbor, still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green. She was calling, "Children! _Children!_ Come and help with the supper."
She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of intense quiet, in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun poured a flood of palpable gold on the three motionless figures in the garden.
Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the largest of the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets, a pail, an ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about them, wrought to exaltation by the complicated smell of the eatables.
"Neale was just coming in the front gate," she explained, as he nodded familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's cheek. "Cousin Hetty, just _look_ at Elly in that night-cap of Great-aunt Pauline's. Doesn't she look the image of that old daguerreotype of Grandmother? See here, Mark, who said you could trail that sword out here? That belongs in the attic."
"Oh, let him, let him," said Cousin Hetty peaceably.
"There's nothing much less breakable than a sword. He can't hurt it."
"I've woren it lots of times before," said Mark. "Aunt Hetty always let me to. Favver, won't you 'trap it tight to me, so's I won't 'traddle it so much."
"Mother," said Elly, coming up close to Marise, as she stood unpacking the dishes, "I was looking inside that old diary, the one in the red leather cover, your grandmother's, I guess, the diary she wrote when she was a young lady. And she was having a perfectly dreadful time whether she could believe the Doctrine of the Trinity. She seemed to feel so bad about it. She wrote how she couldn't sleep nights, and cried, and everything. It was the Holy Ghost she couldn't make any sense out of. Mother, what in the world _is_ the Doctrine of the Trinity?