“Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family come Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor’s children. Then the servants—long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for the other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten children have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children will arrive. The ten will bring with them some unimportant parents; you can judge.”
“That will do for size,” he said, laughing. “Now the kind: spruce—larch—hemlock—pine—which shall it be?”
“It shall be none of them!” she answered, after a little waiting. “It shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer are harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts—fir. The old Christmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it longest. And deepest mystery darkens the heart of it,” she added.
“Fir it shall be!” he said. “Choose the tree.”
“I have chosen.”
She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of one white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.
“That one,” she said, pointing down.
The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully, but now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near the middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this island, aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of its boughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering faultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more years—a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred with wildness and lapped by low washings of the planet’s primeval ocean.
At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the thicket.
“That one,” she now said, pointing down. “This is the last time. Let us have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect that is demanded for sacrifice?”