“But you shouldn’t hold your finger out like that!” Sarah corrected presently. “You’ll get the habit.”
“No, I won’t!” Blue Bonnet declared; she looked from one busy worker to another. How nimble every pair of hands in the room, except hers, seemed.
“I—I hate crocheting!” she announced presently. “It makes me feel cross and as if I should go to pieces.”
“I like it,” Sarah looked down at the bed-shoe she was making. “Only I don’t get much time for it.”
Five minutes longer Blue Bonnet worked, then she pushed back her chair. “Fifteen minutes—and as many more as you like—for refreshments. Sarah, will you please cut the pies?”
And after refreshments, with the dusk coming on, and Blue Bonnet firmly refusing to have the lights lit, there was nothing for it but to gather about the fire and talk.
“Now this is what I call a sensible way of spending one’s time!” Blue Bonnet threw on another log. “Let’s talk Christmas—remember, if you please, that this is the first time I’ve had a lot of girls to talk it with.”
She went with them to the door, when at last she could neither coax nor cajole them into remaining any longer, and from there on down to the gate—first catching up Aunt Lucinda’s garden cape from its nail.
All but Kitty were going home to what Blue Bonnet mentally designated “families,” and Kitty lived next door to Amanda and was almost as much at home in the Parker house as in her own.
It seemed to Blue Bonnet, as she stood there in the fast-falling snow, watching the six walk briskly off down the darkening street, Kitty and Debby stopping now and again to exchange snowballs with a passing friend, that of all seasons of the year, Christmas was the very nicest in which to be part of a large family.