To return now to Mr. Langley and the day before Christmas—that Christmas which was to be the happiest of his life.
He hadn’t realised that he was tired until he opened his own gate late that afternoon. Then suddenly such a dead weight of fatigue dropped down upon him that he felt as if he couldn’t crawl to his own door. Certainly he could never attain the sanctuary of his study where he could think over the events of the afternoon and realise the joy that had come to him with the return of his friend as it were from the gates of death.
Someone came to the door and peered eagerly up the street. It was Anna Miller. Forgetting himself, Mr. Langley called to her and hurried up the steps.
“O Anna, is anything wrong?” he asked anxiously, for he would have thought of her as being somewhere with Rusty and Reuben.
“Wrong!” the girl echoed with ringing voice and beaming face. “O Mr. Langley, everything is so beautifully right that it seemed as if you would never, never come. O hurry, please.”
She led him, not as he expected, towards his wife’s door, but into the front room across the passage from the study. It had been the parlour but was seldom used now-a-days.
It looked exceedingly cheerful now, but so would the cellar have looked to Mr. Langley had the potato-bin held the same group that he saw on the brocaded sofa. Mrs. Langley, bright and alert with flushed cheeks and not uncomely, despite Seth Miller’s opinion, sat thereon with Joe, Junior, curled up beside her while Big Bell hung over them, trying now to make herself inconspicuous and really appearing to be twice her natural size.
As the minister paused on the threshold, his wife looked up and smiled. She had actually learned since noon to smile. Or it may be that she had recollected her old smile of twenty-odd years ago, for she looked to Russell Langley at that moment like the bride of his youth, or rather like little Ella May’s mother.
“Russell, what do you think! Anna has offered us this precious baby as a Christmas gift!” she cried eagerly. “Shall we accept?”
He put Anna into the most comfortable chair in the room and moved it close to the sofa. Then he seated himself the other side of the baby whom he bent to kiss. And little Joe repeated what no doubt seemed to him the pass-word for this household, “baa-baa!”