"I have promised to take her place here, and we have planned a tiny individual Christmas tree for each child in the hospital. I am going to take the girls down there Saturday and let them talk to the children, and find out, as far as possible, what gift would make each one happy. Be sure to come in with Lloyd. Even if we have failed in our efforts to find little Dot, we may have a hand in making twenty other little souls supremely happy on Christmas Day. Come on the early train, and we will go to the hospital first, and spend the rest of the day in shopping."
Luckily it was late in the week when the letter arrived, or Lloyd would have had a hard time waiting for Saturday. So impatient was she for the holiday to come that she began to count the hours and then even the minutes.
"Two whole days and nights!" she exclaimed. "That makes forty-eight hours, and there's sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute. That makes—let me see." It was too big a sum to do in her head, so she ran for pencil and paper and began multiplying carefully, putting down the amount in neat little figures.
"One hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred seconds," she announced, finally. "What a terrible lot. The clock has to tick that many times before I can go."
"But remember, part of that time you will be asleep," suggested Papa Jack. "Over fifty thousand of these seconds will be ticked off when you know nothing about it."
That was some comfort, and the Little Colonel, putting on her warmest winter wrappings, went out to make some of the other seconds go by unnoticed, by rolling up snowballs for a huge snow-man on the lawn.
It had been a dull week in the hospital. Gray skies and falling snow is a dreary outlook for children who can do nothing but lie in their narrow beds and look wearily out of the windows. This Saturday morning the nurses had given the little invalids their baths and breakfasts, the doctors had made their rounds, and in each ward were restless little bodies who longed to be amused.
Those who were well enough to be propped up in bed fingered the games and pictures that had entertained them before; but a dozen pairs of eyes in search of some new interest turned expectantly toward the door every time it opened. Suddenly a stir went through the ward where the convalescents lay, and the wintry morning seemed to blossom into June-time.
Four little girls, each with her arms full of great red roses, with leafy stems so long that it seemed the whole bush must have been cut down with them, passed down the room, leaving one at each pillow.
"My Aunt Elise sent them," said the smallest child, pausing at the first white bed. "She asked us to bring them 'cause she couldn't come herself. They're American Beauties and they always make me think of my Aunt Elise."