“And now what next, Honey?”
“Sentence—and we won’t know until the last day of school!”
But when that all-important Friday arrived, Blue Bonnet came home jubilant.
“I’ve passed!” she announced to Solomon watching for her at the gate. Uncle Cliff was the next to hear the news; he was on the veranda—walking up and down and thinking the afternoon unusually long. Grandmother and Aunt Lucinda heard it next; then Blue Bonnet carried the glad tidings out to the kitchen.
“And now,” she came back to the veranda, “now I’m ready for a good time. And Monday’ll be Christmas! And to-morrow—which’ll be like Christmas Eve—we’re going into town! I say, Uncle Cliff, what larks!”
CHAPTER XIV
CHRISTMAS
Aunt Lucinda was playing Christmas carols; it seemed to Blue Bonnet, listening in her big chair by one of the long windows, that the air had been full of carols all day. At church in the morning, at Sunday school in the afternoon; and later, as she and Grandmother made their rounds in the big, old-fashioned sleigh, carrying Christmas cheer to more than one home, the very bells had seemed to be singing a carol of their own.
The little bank had been emptied of its contents the morning before, considerably more coming out than Blue Bonnet herself had put in, though she had been faithful in those weekly contributions; and she and Uncle Cliff had spent a delightful hour in a little toyshop, rather off the main stream of traffic—chosen because it was little and looked sort of lonely and forlorn, whose proprietor had been most sincere in his urgent request that they should call again.
That long day in Boston,—with the blessed knowledge at the back of one’s mind that one had “passed,” and that school was done with for ten whole days; with the wind nipping one’s fingertips and reddening one’s cheeks; with the stores reminding one of the fairy-land, and the streets almost as gay and wonderful as the stores; with Uncle Cliff declaring that Christmas only came once a year, and that this was the first time they had ever had a chance to go shopping together properly,—had been a day not soon to be forgotten.