"I've been thinking that we might take her up a little while at dessert. She asked to sit up before Charlie came. What a day of excitement!"
"O Hal! it's all lovely. And I can't help thinking how good God was not to let her die in the night, when we were to have such a happy day. He saw it, with the angels keeping Christmas around him; didn't he, Hal?" said little Dot.
"Yes, my darling."
"And I'm so full of joy! I can't help crying every other minute! And to think of that magnificent Charlie earning fifty dollars!"
Hal went to summon the "children," and explain to Granny, that if she would be very quiet, and take a good rest, she might get up when the dessert was brought on. The old woebegone look had vanished from her face, and the faded eyes held in their depths a tender brightness.
She assented rather unwillingly to the proposal, for she could hardly bear them out of her sight an instant. Hal closed the door between, but she begged him to open it again.
"I'd like to hear you talk. I'll lie still, and never say a word."
A happy group they were, gathered round the table. Dot was perched up at the head, and Hal took the opposite end, to do the carving. They had time, then, to look round and see how pretty Charlie was growing. The contact with refinement, and, in a certain sense, society, had improved her very much. If any thing, she had grown still farther out of the Wilcox sphere.
Then she had to tell her story.
"You really don't mean Mary Jane Wilcox?" interrupted Joe. "Why, we used to go to school together!"