“Well, I have to just tease it out of mother. You don’t know how I have to tease.”
Olga could imagine. “Well,” she said, “the girls all guess how it is about Elizabeth, and, if you come to the tree and she doesn’t, I shan’t envy you, that’s all. You are smart enough to think up some way to help Elizabeth out.”
“I d’know how!” grumbled Sadie. “I think you’re real mean, Olga Priest—always saying things to spoil my fun, so there!” and she whirled around and went back to the other girls.
“All the same,” said Olga to herself, “I’ve set her to thinking.”
The next afternoon Sadie burst tumultuously into Olga’s room crying out, “I’ve thought what Elizabeth can do! She can make some cakes—she made some for us last Christmas—awful nice ones, with nuts an’ citron an’ raisins in ’em. She can put white icing over ’em an’ little blobs of red sugar for holly berries, you know, with citron leaves. I thought that up myself, about the icing. Won’t they be dandy?”
“Fine! Good for you, Sadie!”
Sadie accepted the approval as her due, and went on breathlessly, “I thought it all out in school to-day. An’ say, Olga—I can make baskets of green and white crêpe paper to hold three or four of the cakes, an’ stick a bit of holly in each basket. Then they can be from me an’ ’Lizabeth both—how’s that?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Olga declared.
“Uh huh, you see little Sadie has a head on her all right!” Sadie exulted. But Olga could overlook her conceit since, for once, she had taken thought for Elizabeth too.
Laura wondered if, amid all the bustle and excitement of Christmas planning and doing, Jim would forget about the Christmas for the Children’s Hospital, but he did not forget; and when she told him that she was depending upon him to tell her what the boys there would like, Jim had no trouble at all in deciding. So one Saturday Miss Laura took him down town early before the stores were crowded and they had a delightful time selecting books and toys.