“Why not?” she queried, promptly. “We always do have a present at Christmas.”
“This Christmas,” Winifred remarked, sententiously, “will not be like other Christmases.”
Polly frowned and threaded her needle.
“Don’t be mysterious, for goodness sake!” she cried; “you do so love putting on creepy, crawly sort of ways, Winnie.”
Winifred set all her little treasures in their proper places; everything looked spotless and at its best.
“Father has lost a lot of money this year. I heard mother and Aunt Nellie talking together the other afternoon, and I found out then the meaning of lots of things that have puzzled us lately. We are living beyond our income,” Winifred said, rather grandly—she said it as if she were making a notable statement. “We only stay on here because father has a long lease of the house, and we should have to pay the rent whether we lived here or not. Besides, mother told Christina that she hoped things would mend in the next year, and she doesn’t want to make any big change till Chrissie is married.”
Polly darned on laboriously.
The rug was dusty and the floor was hard, and something, she did not know what, seemed to be pressing very tightly on her heart. She was sorry, in a vague sort of way, that she should have been so cross, and that she should have desired her father to give her a Christmas present.
She was not very old or learned as yet, but she had a very deep font of sympathy in her fresh young heart, and Winifred’s clear, matter-of-fact statement seemed to make a claim upon that sympathy for some reason or other.
She recalled her father’s face as he had kissed them good-by that morning, before rushing off to the city, after a hurried breakfast, and what she had called “Monday grumps,” took another form now.