ow
sun with red rays, which was the sun of divine forgiveness Once the
Wilbur twin caught the eye of the Whipple girl--whose bonnet hid her
cropped hair--and she surprisingly winked at him. He did not wink back.
Even to his liberal mind, it did not seem right to wink in a
Sunday-school.

When at last they all sang "Bringing in the Sheaves," and were ably
dismissed by Lyman Teaford, who could be as solemn here as he was gay in
a parlour with his flute, Winona took the Merle twin across the room to
greet the Whipple stepmother and the Whipple girl. Wilbur regarded the
scene from afar. Winona seemed to be showing off the Merle twin, causing
him to display all his perfect manners, including a bow lately acquired.

The Wilbur twin felt no slight in this. He was glad enough to be left
out of Winona's manoeuvres, for he saw that they were manoeuvres and
that Winona was acting from some large purpose. Unless it wanted its
money back, the Whipple family had no meaning for him; it was merely
people with the Whipple nose, though, of course, the stepmother did not
have this. He paused only to wonder if the girl would have it when she
grew up--she now boasted but the rudiments of any nose whatsoever--and
dismissed the tribe from his mind.

He waited for Winona and Merle a block up the street from the church.
Winona was silent with importance, preoccupied, grave, and yet uplifted.
Not until they reached the Penniman gate did she issue from this
abstraction to ask the Wilbur twin rather severely what lesson he had
learned from the morning sermon. The Wilbur twin, with immense
difficulty, brought her to believe that he had not heard a word of the
sermon. This was especially incredible, because it had dealt with the
parable of the prodigal son who spent all his substance in riotous
living. One would have thought, said Winona, that this lesson would have
come home to one who had so lately followed the same bad course, and she
sought now to enlighten the offender.

"And he had to eat with the pigs when his money was all gone," Merle
submitted in an effort to aid Winona.

But the Wilbur twin's perverse mind merely ran to the picture of fatted
calf, though without relish--he did not like fat meat.

It was good to be back in a human atmosphere once more, where he could
hear his father's quips. The Penniman Sunday dinner was based notably on
chicken, as were all other Sunday dinners in Newbern, and his father,
when he entered the house