For if Iver should possibly arrive, not even the type of fare set before aviators on a moonlit beach and jollified by the airy slang of space, was meet for the returning You!
“Those air-scouts would call these coated chocolate bars creamed joy-sticks,” thought Sara, as she reverted to candy-making and Camp Fire recipes. “Well! if Iver should be with us, again, on Christmas Day, every mouthful I eat will be a joy-stick--tasteless except for the joy. Oh-h! just suppose he should come to-night while I’m out--attending that Christmas Ceremonial at the Deerings’ home.”
“Maybe I could send him to fetch you,” returned her mother, to whom the latter remark was made aloud. “But, to my mind, there’s hardly a chance of it!... Here’s a box which has just come for you, daughter!”
“Oh, good gracious! it couldn’t be--from--him?”
No! It was a bunch of pearl-white Christmas roses grown in the conservatories of Manchester-by-the-Sea.
With it was no accompanying card, but a sheet of creamy, rough-edged, masculine note-paper, on which were a series of rather clever pen-sketches: overalled girls wielding rake, hoe, and sprayer upon a sea-girt hill; on the next page, a youth steering a blind horse between reefs of lumber, then with his back bent under a ponderous ship’s rib--a girl defying him--lastly, that girl upright in a dory that might have escaped from some boat-bedlam, signaling to Coast Guards.
“Atlas knew what would appeal to a Camp Fire Girl, with a taste for primitive picture-writing,” murmured the Flame to herself, nursing the starry roses, the stars in the eyes above them shining through those gold-tipped lashes, like a rayed nebula. “Well, well! I suppose this is a sort of silent tribute to the fact that we all--all--came through the Game with our wings, as an aviator would say; that we weren’t grounded in what we set out to do!”
A thought which made the awarding of honors at that Christmas Ceremonial, in the dying days of 1918, a rite at once more triumphant and touching than the bestowal of any honor-beads before!
For each khaki-colored bead strung upon a leather thong testified to the contributing of an individual bit in the hour of Freedom’s main bitt, when it was the anchoring prop to which the mainsail of progress, the mainsheet of safety, were made fast.
Yes! and, in a way, the lives over there, too. For many a soldier owed his rations and his recovery to the tireless zeal of voluntary workers on this side of the water.