Mr. Fairchild looked at his wife, touched his breast pocket where a paper rustled, threw back his head, and roared.
"How perfectly delicious!" exclaimed Mrs. Fairchild. Then her merry laugh rang out.
"What is the joke?" asked Jeanne. "Can you see it, Roger?"
"No, I can't—they're just havin' fun with us. But, if eleven cents would help you any—"
Roger's clothes fitted so snugly that it was rather a difficult task to extract the eleven pennies from his pocket; but he fished them out, one by one.
"There, as your Captain would say, 'Them's yourn.' I hope you won't be reckless with 'em because they're all I've got—except a quarter. You can't have that."
"Why!" said Jeanne, who had been counting on her fingers, "this makes just enough. I had fifty-eight cents. I wonder what Uncle Charles would have done if I'd bought him a pipe. He always smoked cigarettes—a smelly kind that I didn't like. I wouldn't have dared. He'd have been polite, but he would have looked at the pipe as if—as if it were a snail in his coffee!"
"Oh, Jeanne!" protested Mrs. Fairchild. "What a horrid thought!"
"Isn't it? Now when can I buy that other pipe? Not tomorrow, because of that school entertainment. That'll last until dark. Not the next day morning—-"
"Very late the day before Christmas," decided Mrs. Fairchild, quickly, "I'll take you downtown in the car. Then you can take your parcels to Bessie and Lucy and invite them to the Christmas night part of the tree, while I'm doing a few errands. Remember, Christmas night, not Christmas eve."