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                                 _The_
                                ROMANCE
                                _of a_
                               CHRISTMAS
                                 CARD



                                  BY
                          KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN


                            ILLUSTRATED BY
                           ALICE ERCLE HUNT



                         BOSTON _and_ NEW YORK
                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                    The Riverside Press, Cambridge

                                 1916


         COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY

                COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY KATE DOUGLAS RIGGS




[Illustration: Frontispiece]

The Romance of a Christmas Card




I


It was Christmas Eve and a Saturday night when Mrs. Larrabee, the
Beulah minister's wife, opened the door of the study where her husband
was deep in the revision of his next day's sermon, and thrust in her
comely head framed in a knitted rigolette.

"Luther, I'm going to run down to Letty's. We think the twins are
going to have measles; it's the only thing they haven't had, and
Letty's spirits are not up to concert pitch. You look like a blessed
old prophet to-night, my dear! What's the text?"

The minister pushed back his spectacles and ruffled his gray hair.

"Isaiah VI, 8: '_And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying
whom shall I send?... Then said I, Here am I, send me!_'"

"It doesn't sound a bit like Christmas, somehow."

"It has the spirit, if it hasn't the sound," said the minister. "There
is always so little spare money in the village that we get less and
less accustomed to sharing what we have with others. I want to remind
the people that there are different ways of giving, and that the
bestowing of one's self in service and good deeds can be the best of
all gifts. Letty Boynton won't need the sermon!--Don't be late, Reba."

"Of course not. When was I ever late? It has just struck seven and
I'll be back by eight to choose the hymns. And oh! Luther, I have some
fresh ideas for Christmas cards and I am going to try my luck with
them in the marts of trade. There are hundreds of thousands of such
things sold nowadays; and if the 'Boston Banner' likes my verses well
enough to send me the paper regularly, why shouldn't the people who
make cards like them too, especially when I can draw and paint my own
pictures?"

"I've no doubt they'll like them; who wouldn't? If the parish knew
what a ready pen you have, they'd suspect that you help me in my
sermons! The question is, will the publishers send you a check, or
only a copy of your card?"

"I should relish a check, I confess; but oh! I should like almost as
well a beautifully colored card, Luther, with a picture of my own
inventing on it, my own verse, and R. L. in tiny letters somewhere in
the corner! It would make such a lovely Christmas present! And I
should be so proud; inside of course, not outside! I would cover my
halo with my hat so that nobody in the congregation would ever notice
it!"

The minister laughed.

"Consult Letty, my dear. David used to be in some sort of picture
business in Boston. She will know, perhaps, where to offer your
card!"

At the introduction of a new theme into the conversation Mrs. Larrabee
slipped into a chair by the door, her lantern swinging in her hand.

"David can't be as near as Boston or we should hear of him sometimes.
A pretty sort of brother to be meandering foot-loose over the earth,
and Letty working her fingers to the bone to support his
children--twins at that! It was just like David Gilman to have twins!
Doesn't it seem incredible that he can let Christmas go by without a
message? I dare say he doesn't even remember that his babies were born
on Christmas eve. To be sure he is only Letty's half-brother, but
after all they grew up together and are nearly the same age."

"You always judged David a little severely, Reba. Don't despair of
reforming any man till you see the grass growing over his bare bones.
I always have a soft spot in my heart for him when I remember his
friendship for my Dick; but that was before your time.--Oh! these
boys, these boys!" The minister's voice quavered. "We give them our
very life-blood. We love them, cherish them, pray over them, do our
best to guide them, yet they take the path that leads from home. In
some way, God knows how, we fail to call out the return love, or even
the filial duty and respect!--Well, we won't talk about it, Reba; my
business is to breathe the breath of life into my text: 'Here am I,
Lord, send me!' Letty certainly continues to say it heroically,
whatever her troubles."

"Yes, Letty is so ready for service that she will always be sent, till
the end of time; but if David ever has an interview with his Creator
I can hear him say: 'Here am I, Lord; send Letty!'"

The minister laughed again. He laughed freely and easily nowadays. His
first wife had been a sort of understudy for a saint, and after a
brief but depressing connubial experience she had died, leaving him
with a boy of six; a boy who already, at that tender age, seemed to
cherish a passionate aversion to virtue in any form--the result,
perhaps, of daily doses of the catechism administered by an abnormally
pious mother.

The minister had struggled valiantly with his paternal and parochial
cares for twelve lonely years when he met, wooed, and won (very much
to his astonishment and exaltation) Reba Crosby. There never was a
better bargain driven! She was forty-five by the family Bible but
twenty-five in face, heart, and mind, while he would have been printed
as sixty in "Who's Who in New Hampshire" although he was far older in
patience and experience and wisdom. The minister was spiritual, frail,
and a trifle prone to self-depreciation; the minister's new wife was
spirited, vigorous, courageous, and clever. She was also Western-born,
college-bred, good as gold, and invincibly, incurably gay. The
minister grew younger every year, for Reba doubled his joys and halved
his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other
as if they were feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of
Beulah like a salt sea breeze. She infused a new spirit into the bleak
church "sociables" and made them positively agreeable functions. The
choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and
flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced
up the missionary societies, she captivated the parish, she cheered
the depressed and depressing old ladies and cracked jokes with the
invalids.

"Ain't she a little mite too jolly for a minister's wife?" questioned
Mrs. Ossian Popham, who was a professional pessimist.

"If this world is a place of want, woe, wantonness, an' wickedness,
same as you claim, Maria, I don't see how a minister's wife _can_ be
too jolly!" was her husband's cheerful reply. "Look how she's melted
up the ice in both congregations, so't the other church is most
willin' we should prosper, so long as Mis' Larrabee stays here an' we
don't get too fur ahead of 'em in attendance. Me for the smiles,
Maria!"

And Osh Popham was right; for Reba Larrabee convinced the members of
the rival church (the rivalry between the two being in rigidity of
creed, not in persistency in good works) that there was room in heaven
for at least two denominations; and said that if they couldn't unite
in this world, perhaps they'd get round to it in the next. Finally,
she saved Letitia Boynton's soul alive by giving her a warm,
understanding friendship, and she even contracted to win back the
minister's absent son some time or other, and convince him of the
error of his ways.

"Let Dick alone a little longer, Luther," she would say; "don't hurry
him, for he won't come home so long as he's a failure; it would please
the village too much, and Dick hates the village. He doesn't accept
our point of view, that we must love our enemies and bless them that
despitefully use us. The village did despitefully use Dick, and for
that matter, David Gilman too. They were criticized, gossiped about,
judged without mercy. Nobody believed in them, nobody ever praised
them;--and what is that about praise being the fructifying sun in
which our virtues ripen, or something like that? I'm not quoting it
right, but I wish I'd said it. They were called wild when most of
their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified,
their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear,
while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in
this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement.
They wouldn't have been so down on him in Racine, Wisconsin!"

Mrs. Larrabee lighted her lantern, closed the door behind her, and
walked briskly down the lonely road that led from the parsonage at
Beulah Corner to Letitia Boynton's house. It was bright moonlight and
the ground was covered with light-fallen snow, but the lantern habit
was a fixed one among Beulah ladies, who, even when they were not
widows or spinsters, made their evening calls mostly without escort.
The light of a lantern not only enabled one to pick the better side of
a bad road, but would illuminate the face of any male stranger who
might be of a burglarious or murderous disposition. Reba Larrabee was
not a timid person; indeed, she was wont to say that men were so
scarce in Beulah that unless they were out-and-out ruffians it would
be an inspiration to meet a few, even if it were only to pass them in
the middle of the road.

There was a light in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there
was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human
habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by
"Door-Button" Davis, as the little old man was called in the village.
In the distance she could see Osh Popham's two-story house brilliantly
illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even
descried Ossian himself, seated at the cabinet organ in his
shirt-sleeves, practicing the Christmas anthem, his daughter holding a
candle to the page while she struggled to adjust a circuitous alto to
her father's tenor. On the hither side of the Popham house, and quite
obscured by it, stood Letitia Boynton's one-story gray cottage. It had
a clump of tall cedar trees for background and the bare branches of
the elms in front were hung lightly with snow garlands. As Mrs.
Larrabee came closer, she set down her lantern and looked fixedly at
the familiar house as if something new arrested her gaze.

"It looks like a little night-light!" she thought. "And how queer of
Letty to be sitting at the open window!"

Nearer still she crept, yet not so near as to startle her friend. A
tall brass candlestick, with a lighted tallow candle in it, stood on
the table in the parlor window; but the room in which Letty sat was
unlighted save by the fire on the hearth, which gleamed brightly
behind the quaint andirons--Hessian soldiers of iron, painted in gay
colors. Over the mantel hung the portrait of Letty's mother, a benign
figure clad in black silk, the handsome head topped by a snowy muslin
cap with floating strings. Just round the corner of the fireplace was
a half-open door leading into a tiny bedroom, and the flickering flame
lighted the heads of two sleeping children, arms interlocked, bright
tangled curls flowing over one pillow.

Letty herself sat in a low chair by the open window wrapped in an old
cape of ruddy brown homespun, from the folds of which her delicate
head rose like a flower in a bouquet of autumn leaves. One elbow
rested on the table; her chin in the cup of her hand. Her head was
turned away a little so that one could see only the knot of bronze
hair, the curve of a cheek, and the sweep of an eyelash.

"What a picture!" thought Reba. "The very thing for my Christmas card!
It would do almost without a change, if only she is willing to let me
use her."

"Wake up, Letty!" she called. "Come and let me in!--Why, your front
door isn't closed!"

"The fire smoked a little when I first lighted it," said Letty, rising
when her friend entered, and then softly shutting the bedroom door
that the children might not waken. "The night is so mild and the room
so warm, I couldn't help opening the window to look at the moon on the
snow. Sit down, Reba! How good of you to come when you've been
rehearsing for the Christmas Tree exercises all the afternoon."




[Illustration]

II


"It's never 'good' of me to come to talk with you, Letty!" And the
minister's wife sank into a comfortable seat and took off her
rigolette. "Enough virtue has gone out of me to-day to Christianize an
entire heathen nation! Oh! how I wish Luther would go and preach to a
tribe of cannibals somewhere, and make me superintendent of the
Sabbath-School! How I should like to deal, just for a change, with
some simple problem like the undesirability and indigestibility
involved in devouring your next-door neighbor! Now I pass my life in
saying, 'Love your neighbor as yourself'; which is far more difficult
than to say, 'Don't _eat_ your neighbor, it's such a disgusting
habit,--and wrong besides,'--though I dare say they do it half the
time because the market is bad. The first thing I'd do would be to get
my cannibals to raise sheep. If they ate more mutton, they wouldn't
eat so many missionaries."

Letty laughed. "You're so funny, Reba dear, and I was so sad before
you came in. Don't let the minister take you to the cannibals until
after I die!"

"No danger!--Letty, do you remember I told you I'd been trying my hand
on some verses for a Christmas card?"

"Yes; have you sent them anywhere?"

"Not yet. I couldn't think of the right decoration and color scheme
and was afraid to trust it all to the publishers. Now I've found just
what I need for one of them, and you gave it to me, Letty!"

"I?"

"Yes, you; to-night, as I came down the road. The house looked so
quaint, backed by the dark cedars, and the moon and the snow made
everything dazzling. I could see the firelight through the open
window, the Hessian soldier andirons, your mother's portrait, the
children asleep in the next room, and you, wrapped in your cape
waiting or watching for something or somebody."

"I wasn't watching or waiting! I was dreaming," said Letty hurriedly.

"You looked as if you were watching, anyway, and I thought if I were
painting the picture I would call it 'Expectancy,' or 'The Vigil,' or
'Sentry Duty.' However, when I make you into a card, Letty, nobody
will know what the figure at the window means, till they read my
verses."

"I'll give you the house, the room, the andirons, and even mother's
portrait, but you don't mean that you want to put _me_ on the card?"
And Letty turned like a startled deer as she rose and brushed a spark
from the hearth-rug.

"No, not the whole of you, of course, though I'm not clever enough to
get a likeness even if I wished. I merely want to make a color sketch
of your red-brown cape, your hair that matches it, your ear, an inch
of cheek, and the eyelashes of one eye, if you please, ma'am."

"That doesn't sound quite so terrifying." And Letty looked more
manageable.

"Nobody'll ever know that a real person sat at a real window and that
I saw her there; but when I send the card with a finished picture, and
my verses beautifully lettered on it, the printing people will be more
likely to accept it."

"And if they do, shall I have a dozen to give to my Bible-class?"
asked Letty in a wheedling voice.

"You shall have more than that! I'm willing to divide my magnificent
profits with you. You will have furnished the picture and I the
verses. It's wonderful, Letty,--it's providential! You just _are_ a
Christmas card to-night! It seems so strange that you even put the
lighted candle in the window when you never heard my verse. The candle
caught my eye first, and I remembered the Christmas customs we studied
for the church festival,--the light to guide the Christ Child as he
walks through the dark streets on the Eve of Mary."

"Yes, I thought of that," said Letty, flushing a little. "I put the
candle there first so that the house shouldn't be all dark when the
Pophams went by to choir-meeting, and just then I--I remembered, and
was glad I did it!"

"These are my verses, Letty." And Reba's voice was soft as she turned
her face away and looked at the flames mounting upward in the
chimney:--

    My door is on the latch to-night,
      The hearth fire is aglow.
    I seem to hear swift passing feet,--
      The Christ Child in the snow.

    My heart is open wide to-night
      For stranger, kith or kin.
    I would not bar a single door
      Where Love might enter in!

There was a moment's silence and Letty broke it. "It means the sort of
love the Christ Child brings, with peace and good-will in it. I'm glad
to be a part of that card, Reba, so long as nobody knows me, and--"

Here she made an impetuous movement and, covering her eyes with her
hands, burst into a despairing flood of confidence, the words crowding
each other and tumbling out of her mouth as if they feared to be
stopped.

"After I put the candle on the table ... I could not rest for thinking ...
I wasn't ready in my soul to light the Christ Child on his way ... I was
bitter and unresigned ... It is three years to-night since the children
were born ... and each year I have hoped and waited and waited and hoped,
thinking that David might remember. David! my brother, their father! Then
the fire on the hearth, the moon and the snow quieted me, and I felt that I
wanted to open the door, just a little. No one will notice that it's ajar,
I thought, but there's a touch of welcome in it, anyway. And after a few
minutes I said to myself: 'It's no use, David won't come; but I'm glad the
firelight shines on mother's picture, for he loved mother, and if she
hadn't died when he was scarcely more than a boy, things might have been
different.... The reason I opened the bedroom door--something I never do
when the babies are asleep--was because I needed a sight of their faces to
reconcile me to my duty and take the resentment out of my heart ... and it
did flow out, Reba,--out into the stillness. It is so dazzling white
outside, I couldn't bear my heart to be shrouded in gloom!"

"Poor Letty!" And Mrs. Larrabee furtively wiped away a tear. "How long
since you have heard? I didn't dare ask."

"Not a word, not a line for nearly three months, and for the half-year
before that it was nothing but a note, sometimes with a five-dollar
bill enclosed. David seems to think it the natural thing for me to
look after his children; as if there could be no question of any life
of my own."

"You began wrong, Letty. You were born a prop and you've been propping
somebody ever since."

"I've done nothing but my plain duty. When my mother died there was my
stepfather to nurse, but I was young and strong; I didn't mind; and he
wasn't a burden long, poor father. Then, after four years came the
shock of David's reckless marriage. When he asked if he might bring
that girl here until her time of trial was over, it seemed to me I
could never endure it! But there were only two of us left, David and
I; I thought of mother and said yes."

"I remember, Letty; I had come to Beulah then."

"Yes, and you know what Eva was. How David, how anybody, could have
loved her, I cannot think! Well, he brought her, and you know how it
turned out. David never saw her alive again, nor ever saw his babies
after they were three days old. Still, what can you expect of a father
who is barely twenty-one?"

"If he's old enough to have children, he's old enough to notice them,"
said Mrs. Larrabee with her accustomed spirit. "Somebody ought to jog
his sense of responsibility. It's wrong for women to assume men's
burdens beyond a certain point; it only makes them more selfish. If
you only knew where David is, you ought to bundle the children up and
express them to his address. Not a word of explanation or apology;
simply tie a tag on them, saying, 'Here's your Twins!'"

"But I love the babies," said Letty smiling through her tears, "and
David may not be in a position to keep them."

"Then he shouldn't have had them," retorted Reba promptly; "especially
not two of them. There's such a thing as a man's being too lavish with
babies when he has no intention of doing anything for them but bring
them into the world. If you had a living income, it would be one
thing, but it makes me burn to have you stitching on coats to feed and
clothe your half-brother's children!"

"Perhaps it doesn't make any difference--now!" sighed Letty, pushing
back her hair with an abstracted gesture. "I gave up a good deal for
the darlings once, but that's past and gone. Now, after all, they're
the only life I have, and I'd rather make coats for them than for
myself."

Letty Boynton had never said so much as this to Mrs. Larrabee in the
three years of their friendship, and on her way back to the parsonage,
the minister's wife puzzled a little over the look in Letty's face
when she said, "David seemed to think there could be no question of
any life of my own"; and again, "I gave up a good deal for the
darlings once!"

"Luther," she said to the minister, when the hymns had been chosen,
the sermon pronounced excellent, and they were toasting their toes
over the sitting-room fire,--"Luther, do you suppose there ever was
anything between Letty Boynton and your Dick?"

"No," he answered reflectively, "I don't think so. Dick always admired
Letty and went to the house a great deal, but I imagine that was
chiefly for David's sake, for they were as like as peas in a pod in
the matter of mischief. If there had been more than friendship between
Dick and Letty, Dick would never have gone away from Beulah, or if he
had gone, he surely would have come back to see how Letty fared. A
fellow yearns for news of the girl he loves even when he is content to
let silence reign between him and his old father.--What makes you
think there was anything particular, Reba?"

"What makes anybody think anything!--I wonder why some people are
born props, and others leaners or twiners? I believe the very
nursing-bottle leaned heavily against Letty when she lay on her infant
pillow. I didn't know her when she was a child, but I believe that
when she was eight all the other children of three and five in the
village looked to her for support and guidance!"

"It's a great vocation--that of being a prop," smiled the minister, as
he peeled a red Baldwin apple, carefully preserving the spiral and
eating it first.

"I suppose the wobbly vine thinks it's grand to be a stout trellis
when it needs one to climb on, but doesn't the trellis ever want to
twine, I wonder?" And Reba's tone was doubtful.

"Even the trellis leans against the house, Reba."

"Well, Letty never gets a chance either to lean or to twine! Her
family, her friends, her acquaintances, even the stranger within her
gates, will pass trees, barber poles, telephone and telegraph poles,
convenient corners of buildings, fence posts, ladders, and lightning
rods for the sake of winding their weakness around her strength. When
she sits down from sheer exhaustion, they come and prop themselves
against her back. If she goes to bed, they climb up on the footboard,
hang a drooping head, and look her wistfully in the eye for sympathy.
Prop on, prop ever, seems to be the underlying law of the universe!"

"Poor Reba! She is talking of Letty and thinking of herself!" And the
minister's eye twinkled.

"Well, a little!" admitted his wife; "but I'm only a village prop, not
a family one. Where you are concerned"--and she administered an
affectionate pat to his cheek as she rose from her chair--"I'm a
trellis that leans against a rock!"




[Illustration]

III


Letitia Boynton's life had been rather a drab one as seen through
other people's eyes, but it had never seemed so to her till within the
last few years. Her own father had been the village doctor, but of him
she had no memory. Her mother's second marriage to a venerable country
lawyer, John Gilman, had brought a kindly, inefficient stepfather into
the family, a man who speedily became an invalid needing constant
nursing. The birth of David when Letty was three years old, brought a
new interest into the household, and the two children grew to be fast
friends; but when Mrs. Gilman died, and Letty found herself at
eighteen the mistress of the house, the nurse of her aged stepfather,
and the only guardian of a boy of fifteen, life became difficult. More
difficult still it became when the old lawyer died, for he at least
had been a sort of fictitious head of the family and his mere
existence kept David within bounds.

David was a lively, harum-scarum, handsome youth, good at his lessons,
popular with his companions, always in a scrape, into which he was
generally drawn by the minister's son, so the neighbors thought. At
any rate, Dick Larrabee, as David's senior, received the lion's share
of the blame when mischief was abroad. If Parson Larrabee's boy
couldn't behave any better than an unbelieving black-smith's, a
Methodist farmer's, or a Baptist storekeeper's, what was the use of
claiming superior efficacy for the Congregational form of belief?

"Dick's father's never succeeded in bringing him into the church,
though he's worked on him from the time he was knee-high to a toad,"
said Mrs. Popham.

"P'raps his mother kind o' vaccinated him with religion 'stid o'
leavin' him to take it the natural way, as the ol' sayin' is," was her
husband's response. "The first Mis' Larrabee was as good as gold, but
she may have overdone the trick a little mite, mebbe; and what's more,
I kind o' suspicion the parson thinks so himself. He ain't never been
quite the same sence Dick left home, 'cept in preaching'; an' I tell
you, Maria, his high-water mark there is higher 'n ever. Abel Dunn o'
Boston walked home from meetin' with me Thanksgivin', an', says he,
takin' off his hat an' moppin' his forehead, 'Osh,' says he, 'does
your minister preach like that every Sunday?' 'No,' says I, 'he don't.
If he did we couldn't stan' it! He preaches like that about once a
month, an' we don't care what he says the rest o' the time.'"

"Well, so far as boys are concerned, preachin' ain't so reliable, for
behavin' purposes, as a good young alder switch," was the opinion of
Mrs. Popham, her children being of the comatose kind, whose minds had
never been illuminated by the dazzling idea of disobedience.

"Land sakes, Maria! There ain't alders enough on the river-bank to
switch religion into a boy like Dick Larrabee. It's got to come like
a thief in the night, as the ol' sayin' is, but I guess I don't mean
thief, I guess I mean star: it's got to come kind o' like a star in a
dark night. If the whole village, 'generate an' onregenerate, hadn't
'a' kep' on naggin' an' hectorin' an' criticizin' them two boys, Dick
an' Dave,--carryin' tales an' multiplyin' of 'em by two, '_ong root_'
as the ol' sayin' is,--I dare say they'd 'a' both been here yet; 'stid
o' roamin' roun' the earth seekin' whom they may devour."

There was considerable truth in Ossian Popham's remark, as Letty could
have testified; for the conduct of the Boynton-Gilman household, as
well as that of the minister, had been continually under inspection
and discussion.

Nothing could remain long hidden in Beulah. Nobody spied, nobody
pried, nobody listened at doors or windows, nobody owned a microscope,
nobody took any particular notice of events, or if they did they
preserved an attitude of profound indifference while doing it,--yet
everything was known sooner or later. The amount of the fish and meat
bill, the precise extent of credit, the number of letters in the post,
the amount of fuel burned, the number of absences from church and
prayer-meeting, the calls or visits made and received, the hours of
arrival or departure, the source of all incomes,--these details were
the common property of the village. It even took cognizance of more
subtle things; for it observed and recorded the fluctuations of all
love affairs, and the fluctuations also in the religious experiences
of various persons not always in spiritual equilibrium; for the soul
was an object of scrutiny in Beulah, as well as mind, body, and
estate.

Letty Boynton used to feel that nothing was exclusively her own; that
she belonged to Beulah part and parcel; but Dick Larrabee was far more
restive under the village espionage than were she and David.

It was natural that David should want to leave Beulah and make his way
in the world, and his sister did not oppose it. Dick's circumstances
were different. He had inherited a small house and farm from his
mother, had enjoyed a college education, and had been offered a share
in a good business in a city twelve miles away. He left Beulah because
he hated it. He left because he could not endure his father's gentle
remonstrances or the bewilderment in his stepmother's eyes. She was a
newcomer in the household and her glance seemed to say: "Why on earth
do you behave so badly to your father when you're such a delightful
chap?" He left because Deacon Todd had prayed for him publicly at a
Christian Endeavor meeting; because Mrs. Popham had circulated a
wholly baseless scandal about him; and finally because in his young
misery the only being who could have comforted him by joining her
hapless fortunes to his had refused to do so. He didn't know why. He
had always counted on Letty when the time should come to speak the
word. He had shown his heart in everything but words; what more did a
girl want? Of course, if any one preferred a purely fantastic duty to
a man's love, and allowed a scapegrace brother to foist two red-faced,
squalling babies on her, there was nothing to be said. So, in this
frame of mind he had had one flaming, passionate, wrong-headed scene
with his father, and strode out of Beulah with dramatic gestures of
shaking its dust off his feet. His father, roused for once from his
lifelong patience, had been rather terrible in that last scene; so
terrible that he had never forgiven himself, or really believed
himself fully forgiven by God, though his son had alienated half the
village and nearly rent the parish in twain by his conduct.

As for Letty, she held her peace. She could only hope that the
minister and his wife suspected nothing, and she was sure of Beulah's
point of view. That a girl would never give up a suitor, if she had
any hope of tying him to her for life, was a popular form of belief in
the community; and strangely enough it was chiefly the women, not the
men, who made it current. Now and then a soft-hearted and chivalrous
male would observe indulgently of some village beauty, "I shouldn't
wonder a mite if she could 'a' had Bill for the askin'"; but this
opinion would be met by such a chorus of feminine incredulity that its
author generally withdrew it as unsound and untenable.

It was then, when Dick had gone away, that the days had grown drab and
long, but the twins kept Letty's inexperienced hands busy, though in
the first year she had the help of old Miss Clarissa Perry, a
childless expert in the bringing-up of babies.

The friendship of Reba Larrabee, so bright and cheery and
comprehending, was a never-ending solace. There was nothing of the
martyr about Letty. She was not wholly resigned to her lot, and to
tell the truth she did not intend to be, for a good many years yet.

"I'm not a minister, but I'm the wife of a minister, which is the next
best thing," Mrs. Larrabee used to say. "I tell you, Letty, there's no
use in human creatures being resigned till their bodies are fairly
worn out with fighting. When you can't think of another mortal thing
to do, be resigned; but I'm convinced that the Lord is ashamed of us
when we fold our hands too soon!"

"You were born courageous, Reba!" And Letty would look admiringly at
the rosy cheeks and bright eyes of her friend.

"My blood circulates freely; that helps me a lot. Everybody's blood
circulates in Racine, Wisconsin."--And the minister's wife laughed
genially. "Yours, hereabouts, freezes up in your six months of cold
weather, and when it begins to thaw out the snow is ready to fall
again. That sort of thing induces depression, although no mere climate
would account for Mrs. Popham.--Ossian said to Luther the other day:
'Maria ain't hardly to blame, parson. She come from a gloomy stock.
The Ladds was all gloomy, root and branch. They say that the Ladd
babies was always discouraged two days after they was born.'"

The cause of Letty's chief heartache, the one that she could reveal to
nobody, was that her brother should leave her nowadays so completely
to her own resources. She recalled the time when he came home from
Boston, pale, haggard, ashamed, and told her of his marriage, months
before. She could read in his lack-lustre eyes, and hear in his
voice, the absence of love, the fear of the future. That was bad
enough, but presently he said: "Letty, there's more to tell. I've no
money, and no place to put my wife, but there's a child coming. Can I
bring her here till--afterwards? You won't like her, but she's so
ailing and despondent just now that I think she'll behave herself, and
I'll take her away as soon as she's able to travel. She would never
stay here in the country, anyway; you couldn't hire her to do it."

She came: black-haired, sullen-faced Eva, with a vulgar beauty of her
own, much damaged by bad temper, discontent, and illness. Oh, those
terrible weeks for Letty, hiding her own misery, putting on a brave
face with the neighbors, keeping the unwelcome sister-in-law in the
background.

It was bitterly cold, and Eva raged against the climate, the house,
the lack of a servant, the absence of gayety, and above all at the
prospect of motherhood. Her resentment against David, for some reason
unknown to Letty, was deep and profound and she made no secret of it;
until the outraged Letty, goaded into speech one day, said: "Listen,
Eva! David brought you here because his sister's house was the proper
place for you just now. I don't know why you married each other, but
you did, and it's evidently a failure. I'm going to stand by David and
see you through this trouble, but while you're under my roof you'll
have to speak respectfully of my brother; not so much because he's my
brother, but because he's your husband and the father of the child
that's coming:--do you understand?"

Letty had a good deal of red in her bronze hair and her brown eyes
were as capable of flashing fire as Eva's black ones; so the girl not
only refrained from venting her spleen upon the absent David, but
ceased to talk altogether, and the gloom in the house was as black as
if Mrs. Popham and all her despondent ancestors were living under its
roof.

The good doctor called often and did his best, shrugging his shoulders
and lifting his eyebrows as he said: "Let her work out her own
salvation. I doubt if she can, but we'll give her the chance. If the
problem can be solved, the child will do it."




[Illustration]

IV


Well, the problem never was solved, never in this world, at least; and
those who were in the sitting-room chamber when Eva was shown her two
babies lying side by side on a pillow, never forgot the quick glance
of horrified incredulity, or the shriek of aversion with which she
greeted them.

Letty had a sense of humor, and it must be confessed that when the
scorned and discarded babies were returned to her, and she sat by the
kitchen stove trying to plan a second bottle, a second cradle, and see
how far the expected baby could divide its modest outfit with the
unexpected one, she burst into a fit of hysterical laughter mingled
with an outpour of tears.

The doctor came in from the sick-room puzzled and crestfallen from his
interview with an entirely new specimen of woman-kind. He had brought
Letty and David into the world and soothed the last days of all her
family, and now in this tragedy--for tragedy it was--he was her only
confidant and adviser.

Letty looked at him, the tears streaming from her eyes.

"Oh, Doctor Lee, Doctor Lee! If an overruling Providence could smile,
wouldn't He smile now? David and Eva never wanted to marry each other,
I'm sure of it, and the last thing they desired was a child. Now
there are two of them. Their father is away, their mother won't look
at them! What will become of me until Eva gets well and behaves like a
human being? I never promised to be an aunt to twins; I never did like
twins; I think they're downright vulgar!"

    "Waly waly! bairns are bonny:
    One's enough and twa's ower mony,"

quoted the doctor. "It's worse even than you think, my poor Letty, for
the girl can't get well, because she won't! She has gritted her teeth,
turned her face to the wall, and refused her food. It's the beginning
of the end. You are far likelier to be a foster mother than an aunt!"

Letty's face changed and softened and her color rose. She leaned over
the two pink, crumpled creatures, still twitching nervously with the
amazement and discomfort of being alive.

[Illustration: "COME TO YOUR AUNT LETTY THEN AND BE MOTHERED!" SHE
SOBBED]

"Come to your Aunt Letty then and be mothered!" she sobbed, lifting
the pillow and taking it, with its double burden, into her arms. "You
shan't suffer, poor innocent darlings, even if those who brought you
into the world turn away from you! Come to your Aunt Letty and be
mothered!"

"That's right, that's right," said the doctor over a lump in his
throat. "We mustn't let the babies pay the penalty of their parents'
sins; and there's one thing that may soften your anger a little,
Letty: Eva's not right; she's not quite responsible. There are cases
where motherhood, that should be a joy, brings nothing but mental
torture and perversion of instinct. Try and remember that, if it helps
you any. I'll drop in every two or three hours and I'll write David
to come at once. He must take his share of the burden."

Well, David came, but Eva was in her coffin. He was grave and silent,
and it could not be said that he showed a trace of fatherly pride. He
was very young, it is true, thoroughly ashamed of himself, very
unhappy, and anxious about his new cares; but Letty could not help
thinking that he regarded the twins as a sort of personal
insult,--perhaps not on their own part, nor on Eva's, but as an
accident that might have been prevented by a competent Providence. At
any rate, he carried himself as a man with a grievance, and when he
looked at his offspring, which was seldom, it seemed to Letty that he
regarded the second one as an unnecessary intruder and cherished a
secret resentment at its audacity in coming to this planet uninvited.
He went back to his work in Boston without its having crossed his mind
that anybody but his sister could take care of his children. He didn't
really regard them as children or human beings; it takes a woman's
vision to make that sort of leap into the future. Until a new-born
baby can show some personal beauty, evince some intellect, stop
squirming and squealing, and exhibit enough self-control to let people
sleep at night, it is not, as a rule, _persona grata_ to any one but
its mother.

David did say vaguely to Letty when he was leaving, that he hoped
"they would be good," the screams that rent the air at the precise
moment of farewell rather giving the lie to his hopes.

Letty was struggling to end the interview without breaking down, for
she was worn out nervously as well as physically, and thought if she
could only be alone with her problems and her cares she would rather
write to David than tell him her mind face to face.

Brother and sister held each other tightly for a moment, kissed each
other good-bye, and then Letty watched Osh Popham's sleigh slipping
off with David into the snowy distance, the merry tinkle of the bells
adding to the sadness in her dreary heart. Dick gone yesterday, Dave
to-day; Beulah without Dick and Dave! The two joys of her life were
missing and in their places two unknown babies whose digestive systems
were going to need constant watching, according to Dr. Lee. Then she
went about with set lips, doing the last sordid things that death
brings in its wake; doing them as she had seen her mother do before
her. She threw away the husks in Eva's under mattress and put fresh
ones in; she emptied the feathers from the feather bed and pillows and
aired them in the sun while she washed the ticking; she scrubbed the
paint in the sick-room, and in between her tasks learned from Clarissa
Perry the whole process of bringing up babies by hand.

That was three years ago. At first David had sent ten dollars a month
from his slender earnings, never omitting it save for urgent reasons.
He evidently thought of the twins as "company" for his sister and
their care a pleasant occupation, since she had "almost" a living
income; taking in a few coats to make, just to add an occasional
luxury to the bare necessities of life provided by her mother's will.

His letters were brief, dispirited, and infrequent, but they had not
ceased altogether till within the last few months, during which
Letty's to him had been returned from Boston with "Not found"
scribbled on the envelopes.

The firm in whose care Letty had latterly addressed him simply wrote,
in answer to her inquiries, that Mr. Gilman had not been in their
employ for some time and they had no idea of his whereabouts.

The rest was silence.




[Illustration]

V


A good deal of water had run under Beulah Bridge since Letty Boynton
had sat at her window on a December evening unconsciously furnishing
copy and illustration for a Christmas card; yet there had been very
few outward changes in the village. Winter had melted into spring,
burst into summer, faded into autumn, lapsed into winter again,--the
same old, ever-recurring pageant in the world of Nature, and the same
procession of incidents in the neighborhood life.

The harvest moon and the hunter's moon had come and gone; the first
frost, the family dinners and reunions at Thanksgiving, the first
snowfall; and now, as Christmas approached, the same holiday spirit
was abroad in the air, slightly modified as it passed by Mrs. Popham's
mournful visage.

One or two babies had swelled the census, giving the minister hope of
a larger Sunday-School; one or two of the very aged neighbors had
passed into the beyond; and a few romantic and enterprising young
farmers had espoused wives, among them Osh Popham's son.

The manner of their choice was not entirely to the liking of the
village. Digby Popham had married into the rival church and as his
betrothed was a masterful young lady it was feared that Digby would
leave Mr. Larrabee's flock to worship with his wife. Another had
married without visible means of support, a proceeding always to be
regretted by thoroughly prudent persons over fifty; and the third,
Deacon Todd's eldest son, had somehow or other met a siren from
Vermont and insisted on wedding her when there were plenty of
marriageable girls in Beulah.

"I've no patience with such actions!" grumbled Mrs. Popham. "Young
folks are so full of notions nowadays that they look for change and
excitement everywheres. I s'pose James Todd thinks it's a decent,
respectable way of actin', to turn his back on the girls he's been
brought up an' gone to school with, and court somebody he never laid
eyes on till a year ago. It's a free country, but I must say I don't
think it's very refined for a man to go clear off somewheres and marry
a perfect stranger!"

Births, marriages, and deaths, however, paled into insignificance
compared with the spectacular début of the minister's wife as a writer
and embellisher of Christmas cards, two at least having been seen at
the local milliner's store. How many she had composed, and how many of
them (said Mrs. Popham) might have been rejected, nobody knew, though
there was much speculation; and more than one citizen remarked on the
size of the daily package of mail matter handed out by the rural
delivery man at the parsonage gate.

No one but Mrs. Larrabee and Letty Boynton were in possession of all
the thrilling details attending the public appearance of these works
of art; the words and letters of appreciation, the commendation, and
the occasional blows to pride that attended their acceptance and
publication.

Mrs. Larrabee's first attempt, with the sketch of Letty at the window
on Christmas Eve, her hearth-fire aglow, her heart and her door open
that Love might enter in if the Christ Child came down the snowy
street,--this went to the Excelsior Card Company in a large Western
city, and the following correspondence ensued:

     MRS. LUTHER LARRABEE,
          _Beulah, N.H._

     DEAR MADAM:--

     Your letter bears a well-known postmark, for my father and
     my grandfather were born and lived in New Hampshire, "up
     Beulah way." I accept your verses because of the beauty of
     the picture that accompanied them, and because Christmas
     means more than holly and plum pudding and gift-laden trees
     to me, for I am a religious man,--a ministerial father and
     three family deacons saw to that, though it doesn't always
     work that way!--Frankly, I do not expect your card to have a
     wide appeal, so I offer you only five dollars.

     A Christmas card, my dear madam, must have a greeting, and
     yours has none. If the pictured room were a real room, and
     some one who had seen or lived in it should recognize it, it
     would attract his eye, but we cannot manufacture cards to
     meet such romantic improbabilities. I am emboldened to ask
     you (because you live in Beulah) if you will not paint the
     outside of some lonely, little New Hampshire cottage, as
     humble as you like, and make me some more verses; something,
     say, about "the folks back home."

                                         Sincerely yours,
                                            REUBEN SMALL.

                                                    BEULAH, N.H.

     DEAR MR. SMALL:--

     I accept your offer of five dollars for my maiden effort in
     Christmas cards with thanks, and will try my hand at
     something more popular. I am not above liking to make a
     "wide appeal," but the subject you propose is rather a
     staggering one, because you accompany it with a phrase
     lacking rhythm, and difficult to rhyme. You will at once
     see, by running through the alphabet, that "roam" is the
     only serviceable rhyme for "_home_," but the union of the
     two suggests jingle or doggerel. I defy any minor poet when
     furnished with such a phrase, to refrain from bursting at
     once into:--

     No matter where you travel, no matter where you roam,
     You'll never dum-di-dum-di-dee
         The folks back home.

                                         Sincerely yours,
                                            REBA LARRABEE.

     P.S. On second thought I believe James Whitcomb Riley could
     do it and overcome the difficulties, but alas! I have not
     his touch!

     DEAR MRS. LARRABEE:--

     We never refuse verses because they are too good for the
     public. Nothing is too good for the public, but the public
     must be the judge of what pleases it.

     "The folks back home" is a phrase that will strike the eye
     and ear of thousands of wandering sons and daughters. They
     will choose that card from the heaped-up masses on the
     counters and send it to every State in the Union. If you
     will glance at your first card you will see that though
     people may read it they will always leave it on the counter.
     I want my cards on counters, by the thousand, but I don't
     intend that they should be left there!

     Make an effort, dear Mrs. Larrabee! I could get "the folks
     back home" done here in the office in half an hour, but I'm
     giving you the chance because you live in Beulah, New
     Hampshire, and because you make beautiful pictures.

                                         Sincerely yours,
                                            REUBEN SMALL.

     DEAR MR. SMALL:--

     I enclose a colored sketch of the outside of the cottage
     whose living-room I used in my first card. I chose it
     because I love the person who lives in it; because it always
     looks beautiful in the snow, and because the tree is so
     picturesque. The fact that it is gray for lack of paint may
     remind a casual wanderer that there is something to do, now
     and then, for the "folks back home." The verse is just as
     bad as I thought it would be. It seems incredible that any
     one should buy it, but ours is a big country and there are
     many kinds of people living in it, so who knows? Why don't
     you accept my picture and then you write the card? I could
     not put my initials on this! They are unknown, to be sure,
     and I should want them to be, if you use it!

                                         Sincerely yours,
                                            REBA LARRABEE.

         Now here's a Christmas greeting
           To the "folks back home."
         It comes to you across the space,
           Dear folks back home!
         I've searched the wide world over,
           But no matter where I roam,
         No friends are like the old friends,
           No folks like those back home!

     DEAR MRS. LARRABEE:--

     I gave you five dollars for the first picture and verses,
     which you, as a writer, regard more highly than I, who am
     merely a manufacturer. Please accept twenty dollars for "The
     Folks Back Home," on which I hope to make up my loss on the
     first card! I insist on signing the despised verse with your
     initials. In case R. L. should later come to mean
     something, you will be glad that a few thousand people have
     seen it.

                                         Sincerely,
                                            REUBEN SMALL.

The Hessian soldier andirons, the portrait over the Boynton mantel,
and even Letty Boynton's cape were identified on the first card,
sooner or later, but it was obvious that Mrs. Larrabee had to have a
picture for her verses and couldn't be supposed to make one up "out of
her head"; though Osh Popham declared it had been done again and again
in other parts of the world. Also it was agreed that, as Letty's face
was not distinguishable, nobody outside of Beulah could recognize her
by her cape; and that anyhow it couldn't make much difference, for if
anybody wanted to spend fifteen cents on a card he would certainly buy
the one about "the folks back home." The popularity of this was
established by the fact that it was selling, not only in Beulah and
Greentown, but in Boston, and in Racine, Wisconsin, and, it was
rumored, even in Chicago. The village milliner in Beulah had disposed
of twenty-seven copies in thirteen days and the minister's wife was
universally conceded to be the most celebrated person in the State of
New Hampshire.

Letty Boynton had an uncomfortable moment when she saw the first card,
but common sense assured her that outside of a handful of neighbors no
one would identify her home surroundings; meantime she was proud of
Reba's financial and artistic triumph in "The Folks Back Home" and
generously glad that she had no share in it.

Twice during the autumn David had broken his silence, but only to
send her a postal from some Western town, telling her that he should
have no regular address for a time; that he was traveling for a
publishing firm and felt ill-adapted to the business. He hoped that
she and the children were well, for he himself was not; etc., etc.

The twins had been photographed by Osh Popham, who was Jack of all
trades and master of many, and a sight of their dimpled charms, curly
heads, and straight little bodies would have gladdened any father's
heart, Letty thought. However, she scorned to win David back by any
such specious means. If he didn't care to know whether his children
were hump-backed, bow-legged, cross-eyed, club-footed, or
feeble-minded, why should she enlighten him? This was her usual frame
of mind, but in these last days of the year how she longed to pop the
bewitching photographs and Reba's Christmas cards into an envelope and
send them to David.

But where? No word at all for weeks and weeks, and then only a postal
from St. Joseph, saying that he had given up his position on account
of poor health. Nothing in all this to keep Christmas on, thought
Letty, and she knitted and crocheted and sewed with extra ardor that
the twins' stockings might be filled with bright things of her own
making.




[Illustration]

VI


On the afternoon before Christmas of that year, the North Station in
Boston was filled with hurrying throngs on the way home for the
holidays. Everybody looked tired and excited, but most of them had
happy faces, and men and women alike had as many bundles as they could
carry; bundles and boxes quite unlike the brown paper ones with which
commuters are laden on ordinary days. These were white packages,
beribboned and beflowered and behollied and bemistletoed, to be gently
carried and protected from crushing.

The train was filled to overflowing and many stood in the aisles until
Latham Junction was reached and the overflow alighted to change cars
for Greentown and way stations.

Among the crowd were two men with suit-cases who hurried into the way
train and, entering the smoking car from opposite ends, met in the
middle of the aisle, dropped their encumbrances, stretched out a hand
and ejaculated in the same breath:

"Dick Larrabee, upon my word!"

"Dave Gilman, by all that's great!--Here, let's turn over a seat for
our baggage and sit together. Going home, I s'pose?"

The men had not met for some years, but each knew something of the
other's circumstances and hoped that the other didn't know too much.
They scanned each other's faces, Dick thinking that David looked
pinched and pale, David half-heartedly registering the quick
impression that Dick was prosperous.

"Yes," David answered; "I'm going home for a couple of days. It's such
a confounded journey to that one-horse village that a business man
can't get there but once in a generation!"

"Awful hole!" confirmed Dick. "Simply awful hole! I didn't get it out
of my system for years."

"Married?" asked David.

"No; rather think I'm not the marrying kind, though the fact is I've
had no time for love affairs--too busy. Let's see, you have a child,
haven't you?"

"Yes; Letty has seen to all that business for me since my wife died."
(Wild horses couldn't have dragged the information from him that the
"child" was "twins," and Dick didn't need it anyway, for he had heard
the news the morning he left Beulah.) "Wonder if there have been many
changes in the village?"

"Don't know; there never used to be! Mrs. Popham has been ailing for
years,--she couldn't die; and Deacon Todd wouldn't!" Dick's old
animosities still lingered faintly in his memory, though his laughing
voice and the twinkle in his eyes showed plainly that no bitterness
was left. "How's business with you, David?"

"Only so-so. I've had the devil's own luck lately. Can't get anything
that suits me or that pays a decent income. I formed a new connection
the other day, but I can't say yet what there is in it. I'm just out
of hospital; operation; they cut out the wrong thing first, I believe,
sewed me up absent-mindedly, then remembered it was the other thing,
and did it over again. At any rate, that's the only way I can account
for their mewing me up there for two months."

"Well, well, that is hard luck! I'm sorry, old boy! Things didn't
begin to go my way either till within the last few months. I've always
made a fair living and saved a little money, but never gained any real
headway. Now I've got a first-rate start and the future looks pretty
favorable, and best of all, pretty safe.--No trouble at home calls you
back to Beulah? I hope Letty is all right?" Dick cast an anxious side
glance at David, though he spoke carelessly.

"Oh, no! Everything's serene, so far as I know. I'm a poor
correspondent, especially when I've no good news to tell; and anyway,
the mere sight of a pen ties my tongue. I'm just running down to
surprise Letty."

Dick looked at David again. He began to think he didn't like him. He
used to, when they were boys, but when he brought that unaccountable
wife home and foisted her and her babies on Letty, he rather turned
against him. David was younger than himself, four or five years
younger, but he looked as if he hadn't grown up. Surely his boyhood
chum hadn't used to be so pale and thin-chested or his mouth so
ladylike and pretty. A good face, though; straight and clean, with
honest eyes and a likable smile. Lack of will, perhaps, or a
persistent run of ill luck. Letty had always kept him stiffened up in
the old days. Dick recalled one of his father's phrases to the effect
that Dave Gilman would spin on a very small biscuit, and wondered if
it were still true.

"And you, Dick? Your father's still living? You see I haven't kept up
with Beulah lately."

"Keeping up with Beulah! It sounds like the title of a novel, but the
hero would have to be a snail or he'd pass Beulah in the first
chapter!--Yes, father's hale and hearty, I believe."

"You come home every Christmas, I s'pose?" inquired David.

"No; as a matter of fact this is my first visit since I left for
good."

"That's about my case." And David, hung his head a little,
unconsciously.

"That so? Well, I was a hot-headed fool when I said good-bye to
Beulah, and it's taken me all this time to cool off and make up my
mind to apologize to the dad. There's--there's rather a queer
coincidence about my visit just at this time."

"Speaking of coincidences," said David, "I can beat yours, whatever it
is. If the thought of your father brought you back, my mother drew
me--this way!" And he took something from his inside coat pocket.--"Do
you see that?"

Dick regarded the object blankly, then with a quick gesture dived into
his pocket and brought forth another of the same general character.
"How about this?" he asked.

Each had one of Reba Larrabee's Christmas cards but David had the
first unsuccessful one and Dick the popular one with the lonely
little gray house and the verse about the folks back home.

The men looked at each other in astonishment and Dick gave a low
whistle. Then they bent over the cards together.

"It was mother's picture that pulled me back to Beulah, I don't mind
telling you," said David, his mouth twitching. "Don't you see it?"

"Oh! Is that your mother?" And Dick scanned the card closely.

"Don't you remember her portrait that always hung there after she
died?"

"Yes, of course!" And Dick's tone was apologetic. "You see the face is
so small I didn't notice it, but I recognize it now and remember the
portrait."

"Then the old sitting-room!" exclaimed David. "Look at the rag carpet
and the blessed old andirons! Gracious! I've crawled round those
Hessian soldiers, burned my fingers and cracked my skull on 'em, often
enough when I was a kid! When I'd studied the card five minutes, I
bought a ticket and started for home."

David's eyes were suffused and his lip trembled.

"I don't wonder," said Dick. "I recognize the dear old room right
enough, and of course I should know Letty."

"It didn't occur to me that it _was_ Letty for some time," said her
brother. "There's just the glimpse of a face shown, and no real
likeness."

"Perhaps not," agreed Dick. "A stranger wouldn't have known it for
Letty, but if it had been only that cape I should have guessed. It's
as familiar as Mrs. Popham's bugle bonnet, and much prettier. She wore
it every winter, skating, you know,--and it's just the color of her
hair."

"Letty has a good-shaped head," said David judicially. "It shows, even
in the card."

"And a remarkable ear," added Dick, "so small and so close to her
head."

"I never notice people's ears," confessed David.

"Don't you? I do, and eyelashes, too. Mother's got Letty's eyelashes
down fine.--She's changed, Dave, Letty has! That hurts me. She was
always so gay and chirpy. In this picture she has a sad, far-away,
listening look, but mother may have put that in just to make it
interesting."

"Or perhaps I've had something to do with the change of expression!"
thought David. "What attracted me first," he added, "was your
mother's verses. She always had a knack of being pious without
cramming piety down your throat. I liked that open door. It meant
welcome, no matter how little you'd deserved it."

"Where'd you get your card, Dave?" asked Dick. "It's prettier than
mine."

"A nurse brought it to me in the hospital just because she took a
fancy to it. She didn't know it would mean anything to me, but it
did--a relapse!" And David laughed shamedfacedly. "I guess she'll
confine herself to beef tea after this!--Where'd you get yours?"

"Picked it up on a dentist's mantelpiece when I was waiting for an
appointment. I was traveling round the room, hands in my pockets, when
suddenly I saw this card standing up against an hour-glass. The color
caught me. I took it to the window, and at first I was puzzled. It
certainly was Letty's house. The door's open you see and there's
somebody in the window. I knew it was Letty, but how could any card
publisher have found the way to Beulah? Then I discovered mother's
initials snarled up in holly, and remembered that she was always
painting and illuminating."

"Queer job, life is!" said David, putting his card back in his pocket
and wishing there were a little more time, or that he had a little
more courage, so that he might confide in Dick Larrabee. He felt a
desire to tell him some of the wretchedness he had lived through. It
would be a comfort just to hint that his unhappiness had made him a
coward, so that the very responsibilities that serve as a spur to
some men had left him until now cold, unstirred, unvitalized.

"You're right!" Dick answered. "Life is a queer job and it doesn't do
to shirk it. And just as queer as anything in life is the way that
mother's Christmas cards brought us back to Beulah! They acted as a
sort of magic, didn't they?--Jiminy! I believe the next station is
Beulah. I hope the depot team will be hitched up."

"Yes, here we are; seven o'clock and the train only thirty-five
minutes late. It always made a point of that on holidays!"

"Never mind!" And Dick's tone was as gay as David's was sober. "The
bean-pot will have gone back to the cellarway and the doughnuts to the
crock, but the 'folks back home' 'll get 'em out for us, and a mince
pie, too, and a cut of sage cheese."

"There won't be any 'folks back home,' we're so late, I'm thinking.
There's always a Christmas Eve festival at the church, you know. They
never change--in Beulah."

"Then, by George, they can have me for Santa Claus!" said Dick as they
stepped out on the platform. "Why, it doesn't seem cold at all; yet
look at the ice on the river! What skating, and what a moon! My
blood's up, and if I find the parsonage closed, I'll follow on to the
church and make my peace with the members. There's a kind of spell on
me! For the first time in years I feel as though I could shake hands
with Deacon Todd."

"Well, Merry Christmas to you, Dick,--I'm going to walk. Good
gracious! Have you come to spend the winter?" For various bags and
parcels were being flung out on the platform with that indifference
and irresponsibility that bespeak the touch of the seasoned
baggage-handler.

"You didn't suppose I was coming back to Beulah empty-handed, on
Christmas Eve, did you? If I'm in time for the tree, I'm going to give
those blue-nosed, frost-bitten little youngsters something to
remember! Jump in, Dave, and ride as far as the turn of the road."

In a few minutes the tottering old sign-board that marked the way to
Beulah Center hove in sight, and David jumped from the sleigh to take
his homeward path.

"Merry Christmas again, Dick!" he waved.

"Same to you, Dave! I'll come myself to say it to Letty the first
minute I see smoke coming from your chimney to-morrow morning. Tell
her you met me, will you, and that my visit is partly for her, only
that father had to have his turn first. She'll know why. Tell her
mother's card had Christmas magic in it, tell--"

"Say, tell her the rest yourself, will you, Dick?" And Dave broke into
a run down the hill road that led to Letty.

"I will, indeed!" breathed Dick into his muffler.




[Illustration]

VII


Repeating history, Letty was again at her open window. She had been
half-ashamed to reproduce the card, as it were, but something impelled
her. She was safe from scrutiny, too, for everybody had gone to the
tree--the Pophams, Mr. Davis, Clarissa Perry, everybody for a quarter
of a mile up and down the street, and by now the company would be
gathered and the tree lighted. She could keep watch alone, the only
sound being that of the children's soft breathing in the next room.

Letty had longed to go to the festival herself, but old Clarissa
Perry, who cared for the twins now and then in Letty's few absences,
had a niece who was going to "speak a piece," and she yearned to be
present and share in the glory; so Letty was kept at home as she had
been numberless other times during the three years of her vicarious
motherhood.

The night was mild again, as in the year before. The snow lay like
white powder on the hard earth; the moon was full, and the street was
a length of dazzling silence. The lighted candle was in the parlor
window, shining toward the meeting-house, the fire burned brightly on
the hearth, the front door was ajar. Letty wrapped her old cape round
her shoulders, drew her hood over her head, and seating herself at
the window repeated under her breath:--

    "My door is on the latch to-night,
      The hearth-fire is aglow.
    I seem to hear swift passing feet,
      The Christ Child in the snow.

    "My heart is open wide to-night
      For stranger, kith, or kin;
    I would not bar a single door
      Where Love might enter in!"

And then a footstep, drawing ever nearer, sounded crunch, crunch, in
the snow. Letty pushed her chair back into the shadow. The footstep
halted at the gate, came falteringly up the path, turned aside, and
came nearer the window. Then a voice said: "Don't be frightened Letty,
it's David! Can I come in? I haven't any right to, except that it's
Christmas Eve."

That, indeed, was the magic, the all-comprehending phrase that swept
the past out of mind with one swift stroke: the acknowledgment of
unworthiness, the child-like claim on the forgiving love that should
be in every heart on such a night as this. Resentment melted away like
mist before the sun. Her deep grievance--where had it gone? How could
she speak anything but welcome? For what was the window open, the fire
lighted, the door ajar, the guiding candle-flame, but that Love, and
David, might enter in?

There were few words at first; nothing but close-locked hands and wet
cheeks pressed together. Then Letty sent David into the children's
room by himself. If the twins were bewitching when awake, they were
nothing short of angelic when asleep.

[Illustration: "I NEVER THOUGHT OF THEM AS MY CHILDREN BEFORE"]

David came out a little later, his eyes reddened with tears, his hair
rumpled, his face flushed. He seemed like a man awed by an entirely
new experience. He could not speak, he could only stammer brokenly:--

"As God is my witness, Letty, there's been something wrong with me up
to this moment. I never thought of them as my children before, and I
can't believe that such as they can belong to me. They were never
wanted, and I've never had any interest in them. I owe them to you,
Letty; you've made them what they are; you, and no one else."

"If there hadn't been something there to build on, my love and care
wouldn't have counted for much. They're just like dear mother's people
for good looks and brains and pretty manners: they're pure Shirley all
the way through, the twinnies are."

"It's lucky for me that they are!" said David humbly. "You see,
Letty, I married Eva to keep my promise. If I was old enough to make
it, I was old enough to keep it, so I thought. She never loved me, and
when she found out that I didn't love her any longer she turned
against me. Our life together was awful, from beginning to end, but
she's in her grave, and nobody'll ever hear my side, now that she
can't tell hers. When I looked at those two babies the day I left you,
I thought of them only as retribution; and the vision of them--ugly,
wrinkled, writhing little creatures--has been in my mind ever since."

"They were compensation, not retribution, David. I ought to have told
you how clever and beautiful they were, but you never asked and my
pride was up in arms. A man should stand by his own flesh and blood,
even if it isn't attractive; that's what I believe."

"I know, I know! But I've had no feeling for three years. I've been
like a frozen man, just drifting, trying to make both ends meet, my
heart dead and my body full of pain. I'm just out of a hospital--two
months in all."

"David! Why didn't you let me know, or send for me?"

"Oh, it was way out in Missouri. I was taken ill very suddenly at the
hotel in St. Joseph and they moved me at once. There were two
operations first and last, and I didn't know enough to feed myself
most of the time."

"Poor, poor Buddy! Did you have good care?"

"The best. I had more than care. Ruth Bentley, the nurse that brought
me back to life, made me see what a useless creature I was."

Some woman's instinct stirred in Letty at a new note in her brother's
voice and a new look in his face. She braced herself for his next
words, sure that they would open a fresh chapter. The door and the
window were closed now, the shades pulled down, the fire low; the hour
was ripe for confidences.

"You see, Letty,"--and David cleared his throat nervously, and looked
at the coals gleaming behind the Hessian soldiers,--"it's a time for a
thorough housecleaning, body, mind, and soul, a long illness is; and
Miss Bentley knew well enough that all was wrong with me. I mentioned
my unhappy marriage and told her all about you, but I said nothing
about the children."

"Why should you?" asked Letty, although her mind had leaped to the
reason already.

"Well, I was a poor patient in one of the cheapest rooms; broken in
health, without any present means of support. I wanted to stand well
with her, she had been so good to me, and I thought if she knew about
the twins she wouldn't believe I could ever make a living for three."

"Still less for _four_!" put in Letty, with an irrepressible note of
teasing in her tone.

She had broken the ice. Like a torrent set free, David dashed into the
story of the last two months and Ruth Bentley's wonderful influence.
How she had recreated him within as well as without. How she was the
best and noblest of women, willing to take a pauper by the hand and
brace him up for a new battle with life.

"Strength appeals to me," confessed David. "Perhaps it's because I am
weak; for I'm afraid I am, a little!"

"Be careful, Davy! Eva was strong!"

David shuddered. He remembered a strength that lashed and buffeted and
struck and overpowered.

"Ruth is different," he said. "'Out of the strong came forth
sweetness' used to be one of Parson Larrabee's texts. That's Ruth's
kind of strength.--Can I--will you let me bring her here to see you,
Letty,--say for New Year's? It's all so different from the last time I
asked you. Then I knew I was bringing you nothing but sorrow and pain,
but Ruth carries her welcome in her face."

The prop inside of Letty wavered unsteadily for a moment and then
stood in its accustomed upright position.

"Why not?" she asked. "It's the right thing to do; but you must tell
her about the children first."

"Oh! I did that long ago, after I found out that she cared. It was
only at first that I didn't dare. I haven't told you, but she went out
for her daily walk and brought me home a Christmas card, the prettiest
one she could find, she said. I was propped up on pillows, as weak as
a kitten. I looked at it and looked at it, and when I saw that it was
this room, the old fireplace and mother's picture, and the Hessian
soldier andirons, when I realized there was a face at the window and
that the door was ajar,--everything just swam before me and I fainted
dead away. I had a relapse, and when I was better again I told her
everything. She's fond of children. It didn't make any difference,
except for her to say that the more she had to do for me, the more she
wanted to do it."

"Well," said Letty with a break in her voice, "that's love, so far as
I can see, and if you've been lucky enough to win it, take it and be
thankful, and above all, nurse and keep it.--So one of Reba's cards,
the one the publisher thought would never sell, found you and brought
you back! How wonderful! We little thought of that, Reba and I!"

"Reba's work didn't stop there, Letty! There was so much that had to
be said between you and me, just now, that I couldn't let another
subject creep in till it was finished and we were friends;--but Dick
Larrabee saw Reba's card about 'the folks back home' in Chicago and
he bought a ticket for Beulah just as I did. We met in the train and
compared notes."

"Dick Larrabee home?"

The blood started in Letty's heart and sped hither and thither,
warming her from head to foot.

"Yes, looking as fit as a fiddle; the way a man looks when things are
coming his way."

"But what did the card mean to him? Did he seem to like Reba's
verses?"

"Yes, but I guess the card just spelled home to him; and he recognized
this house in a minute, of course. I showed him my card and he said:
'That's Letty fast enough: I know the cape.' He recognized you in a
minute, he said."

He knew the cape! Yes, the old cape had been close to his shoulder
many a time. He liked it and said it matched her hair.

"He was awfully funny about your ear, too! I told him I never noticed
women's ears, and he said he did, when they were pretty, and their
eyelashes, too.--Anything remarkable about your eyelashes, Letty?"

"Nothing that I'm aware of!" said Letty laughingly, although she was
fibbing and she knew it.

"And he said he'd call and say 'Merry Christmas' to you the first
thing to-morrow; that he would have been here to-night but you'd know
his father had to come first. You don't mind being second to the
parson, do you?"

No, Letty didn't mind. Her heart was unaccountably light and glad,
like a girl's heart. It was the Eve of Mary when all women are blest
because of one. The Wise Men brought gifts to the Child; Letty had
often brought hers timidly, devoutly, trustfully, and perhaps to-night
they were coming back to her!




[Illustration]

VIII


"Put the things down on the front steps," said Dick to the driver as
he neared the parsonage. "If there's nobody at home I'll go on up to
the church after I've got this stuff inside."

"Got a key?"

"No, don't need one. I've picked all the locks with a penknife many a
time. Besides, the key is sure to be under the doormat. Yes, here it
is! Of all the unaccountable customs I ever knew, that's the most
laughable!"

"Works all right for you!"

"Yes, and for all the other tramps,"--and Dick opened the door and
lifted in his belongings. "Good-night," he called to the driver; "I'll
walk up to the church after I've found out whether mother keeps the
mince pie and cider apple sauce in the same old place."

A few minutes later, his hunger partially stayed, Dick Larrabee locked
the parsonage door and took the well-trodden path across the church
common. It was his father's feet, he knew, that had worn the shoveled
path so smooth; his kind, faithful feet that had sped to and fro on
errands of mercy, never faltering in all the years.

It was nearly eight o'clock. The sound of the melodeon, with
children's voices, floated out from the white-painted meeting-house,
all ablaze with light; or as much ablaze as a kerosene chandelier and
six side lamps could make it. The horse sheds were crowded with teams
of various sorts, the horses well blanketed and standing comfortably
in straw; and the last straggler was entering the right-hand door of
the church as Dick neared the steps. Simultaneously the left-hand door
opened, and on the background of the light inside appeared the figure
of Mrs. Todd, the wife of his ancient enemy, the senior deacon. Dick
could see that a sort of dressing-room had been curtained off in the
little entry, as it had often been in former times of tableaux and
concerts and what not. Valor, not discretion, was the better policy,
and walking boldly up to the steps Dick took off his fur cap and
said, "Good-evening, Mrs. Todd!"

"Good gracious me! Where under the canopy did you hail from, Dick
Larrabee? Was your folks lookin' for you? They ain't breathed a word
to none of us."

"No, I'm a surprise, Mrs. Todd."

"Well, I know you've given me one! Will you wait a spell till the
recitations is over? You'd scare the children so, if you go in now,
that they'd forget their pieces more'n they gen'ally do."

"I can endure the loss of the 'pieces,'" said Dick with a twinkle in
his eye.

At which Mrs. Todd laughed comprehendingly, and said: "Isaac'll get a
stool or a box or something; there ain't a vacant seat in the church.
I wish we could say the same o' Sundays!--Isaac! Isaac! Come out and
see who's here," she called under her breath. "He won't be long. He's
tendin' John Trimble in the dressin'-room. He was the only one in the
village that was willin' to be Santa Claus an' he wa'n't over-willin'.
Now he's et something for supper that disagrees with him awfully and
he's all doubled up with colic. We can't have the tree till the
exercises is over, but that won't be mor'n fifteen minutes, so I sent
Isaac home to make a mustard plaster. He's puttin' it on John now.
John's dreadful solemn and unamusin' when he's well, and I can't think
how he'll act when he's all crumpled up with stomach-ache, an' the
mustard plaster drawin' like fire."

Dick threw back his head and laughed. He had forgotten just how
unexpected Beulah's point of view always was.

Deacon Todd now came out cautiously.

"I've got it on him, mother, tho' he's terrible unresigned to it; an'
I've given him a stiff dose o' Jamaica Ginger. We can tell pretty soon
whether he can take his part."

"Here's Dick Larrabee come back, Isaac, just when we thought he had
given up Beulah for good an' all!" said Mrs. Todd.

The Deacon stood on the top step, his gaunt, grizzled face peering
above the collar of his great coat; not a man to eat his words very
often, Deacon Isaac Todd.

"Well, young man," he said, "you've found your way home, have you?
It's about time, if you want to see your father alive!"

"If it hadn't been for you and others like you, men who had forgotten
what it was to be young, I should never have gone away," said Dick
hotly. "What had I done worse than a dozen others, only that I
happened to be the minister's son?"

"That's just it; you were bringin' trouble on the parish, makin' talk
that reflected on your father. Folks said if he couldn't control his
own son, he wa'n't fit to manage a church. You played cards, you
danced, you drove a fast horse."

"I never did a thing I'm ashamed of but one,"--and Dick's voice was
firm. "My misdeeds were nothing but boyish nonsense, but the village
never gave me credit for a single virtue. I ought to have remembered
father's position, but whatever I was or whatever I did, you had no
right to pray for me openly for full five minutes at a public meeting.
That galled me worse than anything!"

"Now, Isaac," interrupted Mrs. Todd. "I hope you'll believe me! I've
told you once a week, on an average, these last three years, that you
might have chastened Dick some other way besides prayin' for him in
meetin'!"

The Deacon smiled grimly. "You both talk as if prayin' was one of the
seven deadly sins," he said.

"I'm not objecting to your prayers," agreed Dick, "but there were
plenty of closets in your house where you might have gone and told the
Lord your opinion of me; only that wasn't good enough for you; you
must needs tell the whole village!"

"There, father, that's what I always said," agreed Mrs. Todd.

"Well, I ain't one that can't yield when the majority's against me,"
said the Deacon, "particularly when I'm treatin' John Trimble for the
colic. If you'll stop actin' so you threaten to split the church, Dick
Larrabee, I'll stop prayin' for you. The Lord knows how I feel about
it now, so I needn't keep on remindin' Him."




[Illustration]

IX


"That's a bargain and here's my hand on it," cried Dick. "Now, what do
you say to letting me be Santa Claus? Come on in and let's look at
John Trimble. He'd make a splendid Job or Jeremiah, but I wouldn't let
him spoil a Christmas festival!"

"Do let Dick take the part, father,"--and Mrs. Todd's tone was most
ingratiating. "John's terrible dull and bashful anyway, an' mebbe he'd
have a pain he couldn't stan' jest when he's givin' out the presents.
An' Dick is always so amusin'."

Deacon Todd led the way into the improvised dressing-room. He had
removed John's gala costume in order to apply the mustard faithfully
and he lay in a crumpled heap in the corner. The plaster itself
adorned a stool near by.

"Now, John! John! That plaster won't do you no good on the stool. It
ain't the stool that needs drawin'; it's your stomach," argued Mrs.
Todd.

"I'm drawed pretty nigh to death a'ready," moaned John. "I'm rore,
that's what I am,--rore! An' I won't be Santa Claus neither. I want to
go home."

"Wrop him up and get him into your sleigh, father, and take him home;
then come right back. Bed's the place for him. Keep that hot
flat-iron on his stomach, if he'd rather have it than the mustard.
Men-folks are such cowards. I'll dress Dick while you're gone. Mebbe
it's a Providence!"

On the whole, Dick agreed with Mrs. Todd as he stood ready to make his
entrance. The School Committee was in the church and he had had much
to do with its members in former days. The Select-men of the village
were present, and he had made their acquaintance once, in an executive
session. The deacons were all there and the pillars of the church and
the choir and the organist--a spinster who had actively disapproved
when he had put beans in the melodeon one Sunday. Yes, it was best to
meet them in a body on a festive occasion like this, when the rigors
of the village point of view were relaxed. It would relieve him of
several dozen private visits of apology, and altogether he felt that
his courage would have wavered had he not been disguised as another
person altogether: a popular favorite; a fat jolly, rollicking
dispenser of bounties to the general public. When he finally discarded
his costume, would it not be easier, too, to meet his father first
before the church full of people and have the solemn hour with him
alone, later at night? Yes, as Mrs. Todd said, "Mebbe 'twas a
Providence!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There was never such a merry Christmas festival in the Orthodox church
of Beulah; everybody was of one mind as to that. There was a momentary
fear that John Trimble, a pillar of prohibition, might have imbibed
hard cider; so gay, so nimble, so mirth-provoking was Santa Claus.
When was John Trimble ever known to unbend sufficiently to romp up the
side aisle jingling his sleigh bells, and leap over a front pew
stuffed with presents, to gain the vantage-ground he needed for the
distribution of his pack? The wing pews on one side of the pulpit had
been floored over and the Christmas Tree stood there, triumphant in
beauty, while the gifts strewed the green-covered platform at its
feet.

How gay, how audacious, how witty was Santa Claus! How the village had
always misjudged John Trimble, and how completely had John Trimble
hitherto obscured his light under a bushel. In his own proper person
children avoided him, but they crowded about this Santa Claus,
encircling his legs, gurgling with joy when they were lifted to his
shoulder, their laughter ringing through the church at his droll
antics. A sense of mystery grew when he opened a pack on the pulpit
stairs, a pack unfamiliar in its outward aspect to the Committee on
Entertainment. Every girl had a little doll dressed in fashionable
attire, and every boy a brilliantly colored, splendidly noisy, tin
trumpet; but hanging to every toy by a red ribbon was Mrs. Larrabee's
Christmas card; her despised one about the "folks back home."

[Illustration: HANDS THAT TREMBLED, AS EVERYBODY COULD SEE]

The publishers' check to the minister's wife had been accompanied by a
dozen complimentary copies, but these had been sent to Reba's Western
friends and relations; and although the card was on many a
marble-topped table in Beulah, it had not been bought by all the
inhabitants, by any means. Fifteen cents would purchase something
useful, and Beulah did not contain many Croesuses. Still, here the
cards were,--enough of them for everybody,--with a linen handkerchief
for every woman and every man in the meeting-house, and a dozen more
sticking out of the pack, as the people in the front pews could
plainly see. Modest gifts, but plenty of them, and nobody knew from
whence they came! There was a buzzing in the church, a buzzing that
grew louder and more persistent when Santa Claus threw a lace scarf
around Mrs. Larrabee's shoulders and approached her husband with a
fine beaver collar in his hands: hands that trembled, as everybody
could see, when he buttoned the piece of fur around the old minister's
neck.

And the minister? He had been half in, and half out of, a puzzling
dream for ten minutes, and when those hands of Santa Claus touched
him, his flesh quivered. They reminded him of baby fingers that had
crept around his neck years ago when he patiently walked the parsonage
floor at night with his ailing child in his arms. Every drop of blood
in his veins called out for answer. He looked above the white cotton
beard and mustache to a pair of dark eyes; merry, mischievous, yet
tender and soft; at a brown wavy lock escaping from the home-made wig.
Then those who were near heard a weak voice say, "My son!" and those
who were far away observed Santa Claus tear off his wig and beard,
heard him cry, "Father!"--and, as Mrs. Todd said afterwards, saw him
"fall on to the minister's neck right there before the whole caboodle,
an' cling to him for all the world like an engaged couple, only they
wouldn't 'a' made so free in public."

No ice but would have thawed in such an atmosphere! Grown-up Beulah
forgot how much trouble Dick Larrabee had caused in other days, and
the children had found a friend for all time. The extraordinary number
of dolls, trumpets, handkerchiefs, and Christmas cards circulating in
the meeting-house raised the temperature considerably, and induced a
general feeling that if Dick Larrabee had really ever been a bit wild
and reckless, he had evidently reformed, and prospered, besides.

Yes, no one but a kind and omniscient Providence could have so
beautifully arranged Dick Larrabee's homecoming, and so wisely
superintended his complete reinstatement in the good graces of Beulah
village. A few maiden ladies felt that he had been a trifle immodest
in embracing, and especially in kissing, his father in front of the
congregation; venturing the conviction that kissing, an indecorous
custom in any event, was especially lamentable in public.

"Pity Letty Boynton missed this evenin'," said Mrs. Todd. "Her an'
Dick allers had a fancy for each other, so I've heard, though I don't
know how true. Clarissa Perry might jest as well have stayed with the
twins as not, for her niece that spoke a piece forgot 'bout half of it
an' Clarissa was in a cold sweat every minute. Then the niece had a
fit o' cryin', she was so ashamed at failin', an' Clarissa had to take
her home. So they both missed the tree, an' Letty might 'a' been here
as well as not an' got her handkerchief an' her card. I sent John
Trimble's to him by the doctor, but he didn't take no notice, Isaac
said, for the doctor was liftin' off the hot flat-iron an' puttin'
turpentine on the spot where I'd had my mustard.--Anyway, if John had
to have the colic he couldn't 'a' chosen a better time, an' if he gets
over it, I shall be real glad he had it; for nobody ever seen sech a
Santa Claus as Dick Larrabee made, an' there never was, an' never will
be, sech a lively, an' amusin' an' free-an'-easy evenin' in the
Orthodox church."




[Illustration]

X


"Bless the card!" sighed David thankfully as he sat down to smoke a
good-night pipe and propped his feet contentedly against the little
Hessian soldiers. The blaze of the logs on his own family
hearth-stone, after many months of steam heaters in the hall bedrooms
of cheap hotels, how it soothed his tired heart and gave it visions of
happiness to come! The card was on his knee, where he could look from
its pictured scene to the real one of which he was again a glad and
grateful part.

"Bless the card!" whispered Letty Boynton to herself as she went to
her moonlit bedroom. Her eyes searched the snowy landscape and found
the parsonage, "over the hills and far away." Then her heart flew like
a bird across the distance and beat its wings in gladness, for a faint
light streamed from the parson's study windows and she knew that
father and son were together. That, in itself, was enough, with David
sleeping under the home roof; but to-morrow was coming and to-morrow
might be hers--her very own!

"Bless the card!" said Reba Larrabee, the tears shining in her eyes as
she left the minister alone with his son. "Bless everybody and
everything! Above all, bless God, 'from whom all blessings flow.'"

"Bless the card," said Dick Larrabee when he went up the narrow
parsonage stairs to the room of his boyhood and found everything as it
had been years ago. He leaned the little piece of paper magic against
the mantel clock, threw it a kiss, and then, opening his pocket-book,
he went nearer to the lamp and took out the faded tintype of a
brown-haired girl in a brown cape. "Bless the card!" he said again,
with a new note in his voice: "Bless the girl! And bless to-morrow if
it brings me what I want most in all the world!"

[Illustration]