“Gather around the Christmas tree.”
Doris picked up the melody and led, sitting on a hassock near the doors, gazing with all her eyes up at the beautiful spreading hemlock, laden with lights and gifts.
“For pity’s sake, child, what are you crying about?” exclaimed Cousin Roxy, almost stumbling over a little crumpled figure in a dark corner, and Joe sobbed sleepily:
“I—I don’t know.”
“Oh, it’s just the heartache and the beauty of it all,” said Helen fervently. “He’s lonely for his own folks.”
“ ’Tain’t neither,” groaned Joe. “It’s too much mince pie.”
So under Cousin Roxy’s directions, Billie took him up to his room, and administered “good hot water and sody.”
“Too bad, ’cause he missed seeing all the things taken off the tree,” said Cousin Roxy, laying aside Joe’s presents for him, a long warm knit muffler from herself, a fine jack-knife from the Judge with a pocket chain on it, a package of Billie’s boy books that he had outgrown, and ice skates from the Greenacre girls. After much figuring over the balance left from their Christmas money they had clubbed together on the skates for him, knowing he would have more fun and exercise out of them than anything, and he needed something to bring back the sparkle to his eyes and the color to his cheeks.
“Put them all up on the bed beside him, and he’ll find them in the morning,” Billie suggested. “If you’ll let him stay, Mrs. Robbins, I’ll bring him over.”
“Isn’t it queer,” Doris said, with a sigh of deepest satisfaction, as she watched the others untying their packages. “It isn’t so much what you get yourself Christmas, it’s seeing everybody else get theirs.” And just then a wide, flat parcel landed squarely in her lap, and she gave a surprised gasp.