The horses tossed their heads and whinnied as if they too, said, "Don't keep us waiting." The sun was shining and all the air seemed infused with joy, though it was a sharp winter day. The weather knew its business fifty years ago and didn't sandwich whiffs of spring between snow-banks. And the children were blowing on tin and wooden horns, and wishing everybody Merry Christmas as they ran around with the reddest of cheeks.
Steve took Hanny on his lap. What did make him so laughing and mysterious? He insisted that Hanny should guess, and then kept saying, "Oh, you're cold, cold, cold as an icehouse! You should have put on your guessing cap," and the little girl felt quite teased.
They stopped down-stairs to get good and warm and take off their wraps. Then Stephen led them up to the front room. It was a kind of library and sitting-room, but no one was there. In the window stood a beautiful vase of flowers. Hanny ran over to that. Roses at Christmastide were rare indeed. "Here," said Stephen, catching her arm gently.
She turned to the opposite corner. There was an old-fashioned mahogany cradle, black with age, and polished until it shone like glass. It was lined overhead with soft light-blue silk, and had lying across it a satin coverlet that had grown creamy with age, full of embroidered flowers dull and soft with their many years of bloom.
On the pillow lay her brother's Christmas gift that had come while the bells were still ringing out their message first heard on the plains of Judea.
"Oh!" with a soft, wondering cry. She knelt beside the cradle that had come from Holland a century and a half ago, and held many a Beekman baby. A strange little face with a tinge of redness in it, a round broad forehead with a mistiness of golden fuzz, a pretty dimpled chin and a mouth almost as round as a cherry. Just at that instant he opened the bluest of eyes, stared at Hanny with a grave aspect, tried to put his fist into his mouth and with a soft little sound dropped to sleep again.
A wordless sense of delight and mystery stole over the little girl. She seemed lifted up to Heaven's very gates. She reached out her hand and touched the little velvet fist, not much larger than her doll's, but oh, it had the exquisite inspiration of life and she felt the wonderful thrill to her very heart. Something given to them all that could love back when its time of loving came, when it knew of the fond hearts awaiting the sweetness of affection.
"That's my little boy," said Stephen, with the great pride and joy of fatherhood. "Dolly's and all of ours. Isn't it a Christmas worth having?"
"Oh!" she said again with a wordless delight in her heart, while her eyes were filled with tears, so deeply had the consciousness moved her. There was a sort of poetical pathos in the little girl, sacred to love. She had never known of any babies in the family save Cousin Retty's, and that had not appealed with this delicious nearness.
Stephen bent over and kissed her. Margaret came to look at the baby.