“For a little surprise,” Sheila said presently, “do you think we could go down to see my father in his studio, after we have shopped? I feel like seeing my father to-day. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think of Hitty and my breakfast, and the canary bird, and of you, Miss Dear, fast asleep where I can hear you breathing in your room—if I listen to it—and then other mornings I wake up thinking only of my father, and how he looks in his shirt-sleeves and necktie. I was thinking of him this morning like that. So now I should like to see him.”
“You shall, dear. I want him to see you in your new clothes. He’ll think you look like a little gray bird with a scarlet breast.”
“Then I must open the front of my coat when I go in so he shall see my vest at once, mustn’t I?”
“Do you know how much I love you, Sheila?” Nancy cried suddenly.
“Is it a great deal, Miss Dear?”
“It’s more than I’ve ever loved anybody in this world but one person, and if I should ever be separated from you I think it would break my heart—so that you could hear it crack with a loud report, Sheila.”
The little girl slipped her gray gloved hand into Nancy’s and held it there silently for a moment.
“Then we won’t ever be separated, Miss Dear,” she said.
The shops were crowded with the usual conglomerate Christmas throng, and their progress was somewhat retarded by Sheila’s desire to make the acquaintance of every department-store and Salvation Army Santa Claus that they met in their peregrinations. In the toy department of one of the Thirty-fourth Street 241 shops there was a live Kris Kringle with animated reindeers on rollers, who made a short trip across an open space in one end of the department for a consideration, and presented each child who rode with him a lovely present, tied up in tissue and marked “Not to be opened until Christmas.” Sheila refused a second trip with him on the ground that it would not be polite to take more than one turn.