The sick woman turned with troubled eyes.
"Why, I suppose you'll have to do it," she sighed, "as long as I can't. Part of them are done up, anyway; but there's John's family and Mary and the children left. John's are in the middle drawer of the bureau in the attic hall, and Mary's are in the big box near it. You'll know them right away when you see them. There's paper and strings and ribbons, and cards for the names, besides the big boxes to send them in. Seems as if you ought to do it right, only—well, you know how utterly irresponsible and absent-minded you are sometimes."
"Nonsense!" scoffed Polly Ann. "As if I could n't do up a parcel of presents as well as you! And I'll prove it, too. I'll go right up now," she declared, rising to her feet and marching out of the room.
In the attic hall Polly Ann found the presents easily. She knew which was for which, too; she knew Margaret and her presents of old. She did not need the little bits of paper marked, "For Mary," "For Tom," "For John," "For Julia," to tell her that the woolen gloves and thick socks went into Mary's box, and the handsomely bound books and the fine lace-edged handkerchief into John's.
Mary, as all the Bracketts knew, was the poor relation that had married shiftless Joe Hemenway, who had died after a time, leaving behind him a little Joe and three younger girls and a boy. John, if possible even better known to the Brackett family, was the millionaire Congressman to whom no Brackett ever failed to claim relationship with a proudly careless "He's a cousin of ours, you know, Congressman Brackett is."
At once Polly Ann began her task. And then—
It was the French doll that did it. Polly Ann was sure of that, as she thought it over afterward. From the middle drawer where were John's presents the doll fell somehow into the box where were Mary's. There the fluffy gold of the doll's hair rioted gloriously across a pair of black woolen socks, and the blue satin of its gown swept glistening folds of sumptuousness across a red flannel petticoat. One rose-tipped waxen hand, outflung, pointed, almost as if in scorn, to the corner of the box where lay another doll, a doll in a brown delaine dress, a doll whose every line from her worsted-capped head to her black-painted feet spelled durability and lack of charm.
Polly Ann saw this, and sighed. She was thinking of Mary's little crippled Nellie for whom the brown delaine doll was designed; and she was remembering what that same Nellie had said one day, when they had paused before a window wherein stood another just such a little satin-clad lady as this interloper from the middle bureau drawer.
"Oh, Cousin Polly, look—look!" Nellie had breathed. "Is n't she be-yu-tiful? Oh, Cousin Polly, if—if I had—one—like that, I don't think I 'd mind even these—much," she choked, patting the crutches that supported her.
Polly Ann had sighed then, and had almost sobbed aloud as she disdainfully eyed her own thin little purse, whose contents would scarcely have bought the gown that Miss Dolly wore. She sighed again now, as she picked up the doll before her, and gently smoothed into order the shining hair. If only this were for Nellie!—but it was n't. It was for Julia's Roselle, Roselle who already possessed a dozen French dolls, and would probably possess as many more before her doll days were over, while Nellie—