“Yes, dear, I know. Jeanie told me.” She put Kit to one side, and went straight over to the wood box. And she did just the one right thing. That was the marvel of the Motherbird. She seemed always to know naturally what a person needed most and gave it to them. Down she stooped and took Joe in her arms, his head on her shoulder, patting him while he began to cry chokingly.
“Never mind, laddie, now,” she told him. “You’re home.” She lifted him to her lap and started to untie his worn sodden shoes. “Doris, get your slippers, dear, and a pair of stockings too, the heavy ones. Warm the milk, Kit, it’s better that way. And you cuddle down on the old lounge by the sitting room fire, Joe, and rest. That’s our very best name for the world up here, did you know it? We call it our hills of rest.”
Shad came in breezily, bringing the Christmas boxes and a shower of light snow. He stared at the stranger with a broad grin of welcome.
“Those folks that went up in the automobile stopped off at Judge Ellis’s. Folks from Boston, I understood Hardy to say. He just stopped a minute to ask what was in the boxes, so I thought I’d inquire too.”
Nothing of interest ever got by the Greenacre gate posts if Shad could waylay it. Helen asked him to open the boxes right away, but no, Shad would not. And he showed her where it was written, plain as could be, in black lettering along one edge:
“Not to be opened till Christmas.”
Mrs. Robbins had gone into the sitting room and found a gray woolen blanket in the wall closet off the little side hall. From the chest of drawers she took some of Doris’s outgrown winter underwear. Supper was nearly ready, but Joe was to have a warm bath and be clad in clean fresh clothing. Tucking him under one wing, as Kit said, she left the kitchen and Jean told the rest how she had rescued him from Mr. Briggs’s righteous indignation and charitable intentions.
“Got a good face and looks you square in the eye,” said Shad. “I’d take a chance on him any day, and he can help around the place a lot, splitting kindlings, and shifting stall bedding and what not.”
The telephone bell rang and Jean answered. Rambling up through the hills from Norwich was the party line, two lone wires stretching from home-hewn chestnut poles. Its tingling call was mighty welcome in a land where so little of interest or variation ever happened. This time it was Cousin Roxy at the other end. After her marriage to the Judge, they had taken the long deferred wedding trip up to Boston, visiting relatives there, and returning in time for a splendid old-fashioned Thanksgiving celebration at the Ellis homestead. Maple Lawn was closed for the winter but Hiram, the hired man, “elected” as he said, to stay on there indefinitely and work the farm on shares for Miss Roxy as he still called her.
“And like enough,” Cousin Roxy said comfortably, when she heard of his intentions, “he’s going to marry somebody himself. I wouldn’t put it past him a mite. I wish he’d choose Cindy Anson. There she is living alone down in that little bit of a house, running a home bakery when she’s born to fuss over a man. I told Hiram when I left, if I was him I’d buy all my pies and cake from Cindy, and then when I drove by Cindy’s I just dropped a passing word about how badly I felt at leaving such a fine man as Hiram to shift for himself up at the house, so she said she’d keep an eye on him.”