Bernice claimed his attention several moments, then he turned to Lloyd again. "Do tell me, Miss Lloyd," he begged, "what is that wonderfully and fearfully made thing in the front of the pulpit? Is it a doorway or a giant picture-frame? And what part is it to play in the ceremony?" Lloyd's face dimpled, and an amused smile flashed up at him from the corner of her eye. Then she lowered her long lashes demurely, and seemed to be engrossed with her bunch of roses as she answered him. "The coquettish thing!" thought Bernice, seeing the glance but not hearing the whisper which followed it. "Sh! Don't make me laugh! Everybody is watching to see if the white folks are making fun of things, and I'm actually afraid to look up again for feah I'll giggle. Maybe it's a copy of Eugenia's gate of roses. It looks like the frame of a doahway. Just the casing, you know. Maybe it's a doah of mawning-glories they're going to pass through. I recognize those flowahs twined all around it. We made them a long time ago for the lamp-shades when the King's Daughtahs had an oystah suppah at the manse. I made all those purple mawning-glories and Betty made the yellow ones." Glancing over his shoulder, he happened to spy a familiar face behind him, the kindly old black face of his uncle's cook. "Howdy, Aunt Jane!" he exclaimed, with a friendly smile. Then, in a stage whisper, he asked, "Aunt Jane, can you tell me? Are those morning-glories artificial?" The old woman wrinkled her face into a knot as she peered in the direction of the pulpit, toward which he nodded. One of the words in his question puzzled her. It was a stranger to her. But, after an instant, the wrinkles cleared and her face broadened into a smile. "No'm, Mistah Alex. Them ain't artificial flowahs, honey. They's made of papah." Again an amused smile stole out of the corner of Lloyd's eye to answer the gleam of mischief in Alex's. Not for anything would she have Aunt Jane think that she was laughing, so her eyes were bent demurely on her roses again. Again Bernice, leaning forward, intercepted the glance and misinterpreted it. When Alex turned to her to repeat Aunt Jane's explanation, she barely smiled, then relapsed into sulky silence. Finding several other attempts at conversation received with only monosyllables, he concluded that she was not in a mood to talk, and naturally turned again to Lloyd. He had not been out in the Valley for years, he told her. The last visit he had made to his uncle, old Doctor Shelby, had been the summer that the Shermans had come back to Lloydsboro from New York. He remembered passing her one day on the road. She had squeezed through a hole in the fence between two broken palings, and was trying to pull a little dog through after her; a shaggy Scotch and Skye terrier. "That was my deah old Fritz," she answered, "and I was probably running away. I did it every chance I had."