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the entrails and crawled into thecavity and lay there, as near as Mr. Hildreth could judge, until about midnight. By this time the animal heat was out of the carcass, so they crawled out, and somehow the one that had the knife dropped it.…”
    A few minutes before, while Martha King was serving her guests, she had been ravenously hungry. Now that she could eat and had a plate piled high with food in front of her, she discovered that she had no appetite. She raised her fork halfway to her mouth and then put it down.
    “I wish Pa could hear this,” Nora said, turning around in her chair. “He’d be very interested.”
    But Mr. Potter had discovered that the woman who sat next to him was interested in singing. He was now telling her about all the great singers—Nordica and Melba and Alma Gluck and John McCormack—who had sung at the French Opera in New Orleans, and about the time he happened to be standing on the platform of the railway station in Birmingham when Paderewski’s private car passed through. Mr. Potter had heard none of these artists and his own taste in music did not rise above Sousa’s marches, but he managed nevertheless, out of scraps and hearsay, to make Lucy Beach’s face bloom suddenly, and to place her beyond all doubt in the company from which Geraldine Farrar’s teacher, after a few lessons, had dismissed her.
    “… Hildreth returned to the river bank,” Mr. Ellis said. “And when he found that the ice was strong enough to bear his weight, he crawled across. The man came out and watched him trying to get over the fence and didn’t lift a finger to help him. Finally he tumbled over the fence anyway, and crawled into the house and lay down before the fire. He begged for assistance and when the man relented and would have done something for him, his wife prevented it.” Mr. Ellis began searching for his napkin, which had fallen to the floor. Alice restored it to him. He tucked it into his collar again and then said impressively, “The man’s name was Benjamin Russ. Hiswife’s name is not known, and nobody cares to remember it. They both had to leave the country afterwards, there was so much indignation among the neighbours. Mr. Hildreth always expressed the opinion that they imagined he had a large sum of money on him, and that they could secure it in case of his death. Such hardheartedness was very rare among the early settlers, who were noted like you Southerners”—the old man made a little bow to Nora—“for their hospitality.”
    “Grampaw, you’ve told that story at every gathering you’ve been to in the last twenty years,” Bud Ellis said loudly, from the table in the alcove. “Why don’t you keep still for a while and let somebody else talk?”
    “All right, all right,” the old man said. “I know I’m a tiresome old fool, but just remember that people can’t help it if they live too long. You may live too long yourself.”
    The embarrassment that followed this remark was general. The visitors from Mississippi began talking hurriedly. The Illinois guests were silent and looked down at their plates. No amount of coaxing could make Mr. Ellis finish his story. He sat sulking and feeling sorry for himself until Thelma came to take the plates away and bring the ice cream.

6
    After the card-tables had been cleared and put away in the closet under the stairs, Randolph Potter sat down beside Mary Caroline Link and began to tell her about his favourite riding horse, a jumper named Daisy, that had recently gone lame. The young Southerner was so strikingly handsome that he drew the attention of the others in the room to the couple on the sofa. Mary Caroline’s pink linen dress was charming, but she herself was plain, with a receding chin and heavyblack eyebrows. She had no easy compliments like the girls Randolph was used to, and her shyness forced him to keep thinking up new subjects for conversation.
    Across the room, Nora Potter let her eyes come to rest on her