The knob rattled again. It was not an aggressively loud sound, but Peggy was just tired enough to find it unendurable. Her lips tightened.
"Dorothy, will you stop that noise? This minute!"
Surprise kept Dorothy motionless for almost thirty seconds. "What you doing?" she asked, after that amazing pause, her rosy lips close to the key-hole, her voice persuasive.
"I'm making something you can't see. Please don't bother." Peggy jerked her thread savagely. She was, as a matter of fact, hemstitching the little petticoat of the doll she was dressing for Dorothy. She had laughed when her mother suggested that it was hardly worth while to take so much pains. "A strip of embroidery gathered and put in a band would please the child just as well. She isn't old enough to appreciate the work you are putting into these dainty little garments."
"Work! I don't call it work. It's just fun," said Peggy blithely. "And it's such a tiny way round a doll's petticoat, mother, that it won't take any time to speak of." There would have been time enough if there had not been so many things of the same kind; trifles demanding little time when taken separately, but together filling to overflowing Peggy's hours of leisure, and infringing on the time she needed for recreation and sleep. She thought of them with a sense of nervous apprehension which was far removed from anything festive. There were two of the sweet peas on her mother's centrepiece not finished yet, and those sweet peas took so long.
"I must finish Aunt Rachel's bureau scarf to-night," Peggy thought. "I've got to allow for the mails being slow. Perhaps I'd better leave this till that is done, for I can finish the doll the very last thing." She tucked the petticoat out of sight, and produced the bureau scarf from under a rainbow litter of Dresden ribbon, scraps of silk, and odds and ends of lace, all of which Peggy designed for especial use.
"Next year," thought Peggy, frantically attacking the bureau scarf, "I'm going to begin my Christmas presents New Year's afternoon. Perhaps if I start the first of January and keep right at it through the year--Why, what's that?"
There was a sound in the hall, a choked, low, pitiful sound that seemed startlingly out of place with Christmas near. The bureau scarf dropped to the floor. The spool of thread and the thimble made a bee-line to hide themselves under the dresser, as if they both had enough of getting ready for Christmas. Peggy herself lost no time in turning the key and bolting into the hall, where Dorothy a pensive little heap, her face hidden on her knees, was weeping.
Dorothy had a variety of ways of crying. When angry her tears were accompanied by shrill squeals, as pathetic as a fife playing Yankee Doodle. If she hurt herself she was more likely to relieve her feelings by noise than by tears, suggesting those summer showers whose thunder peals and lightning flashes prepare us for a deluge, but which content themselves, after all, with a few scattering drops. These emotional outbreaks on Dorothy's part Peggy took philosophically. But when she cried softly, hiding the face down which the big tears were coursing, while the sobs shook her little body, then indeed, it was another matter.
"Dorothy!" Peggy cried, dropping down on her knees beside the despondent figure. "Dorothy, what is the matter? What are you crying about?"