"She is thinking of him all the time," my mother said, quietly. "She loves him."
"I know she loves him!" my father cried. "She loves him better than she does me. I was always the one who didn't count! Always."
My mother laid her hand upon his arm and stopped him.
"Hush, Robert," she said.
Her eyes wandered over me sitting on my stool by the fireplace, and passed to little brother Dick playing with his blocks.
"Who can judge a mother's heart?" she questioned, softly, and then turned upon him with a demand that was almost wrathful. "Have you nothing to be thankful for," she cried, "that you grudge him a thought at Christmas time!"
My mother always took grandmother's part. She seemed to understand grandmother better than my father did. Once I heard her say that the curl in the Bible was like one of little Dick's. She laid it against his soft hair, and it matched, color and curl, as if it had been cut from his head. After that she was even kinder to grandmother than before.
Norah out in the kitchen was the happiest person in the house. Every night she wrote home to Ireland, and sometimes she laughed and sometimes she cried. I liked to hear about Ireland. I would climb upon the kitchen table and watch her write, and listen when she read bits of her letters to me. I knew all about Norah's people, and could call her brothers and sisters, and even her cousins, by name. She was sending money in her letter to buy her mother a new green plaid shawl for Christmas. She was, also, going to buy the priest a pig. Norah was worried about the priest. He gave away everything that he had to the poor of the parish, and went hungry all the time. After much thought she had decided on the present of a pig, as being a thing which the priest might keep for himself.
"Though they're that owdacious, Rhoda," she cried, in high wrath, "that I'm thinking they'll take the pig, too!"
"What would they do with the pig, Norah?" I asked, anxiously.