“Yes; she was named for mamma’s best friend, one she hadn’t seen for a long, long time.”
Meanwhile Mrs. Rosenburgh had knelt by the bedside. She had lifted the low-lying head upon her arm, and drawn a bottle of pungent salts from her pocket, and she was crying as if her heart would break, while the children looked wondering on.
“O Ethel, my own old Ethel, wake up!” And then she dropped her cheek, all wet with tears, against the white, cold cheek, that was so still.
Oh, was it the warm tears, or the voice that sounded from far away out of the past, or only the strong odor that roused the poor soul from that long, heavy sleep of exhaustion that had so nearly been the sleep of death? I do not know, but I know the eyes did open, and beheld the tender face bending above them. And then, like a little child, the children heard their mother cry,—
“O Annie, Annie, have I been dreaming all this time?”
And then there were explanations, and the story of the long years since Annie Bryant and Ethel Carlisle were girls together was told. But the best of it all, the children thought, was when the lady from over the way took them home with her, and told them the boy and girl there should be their brother and sister, and they should live there henceforth; for she, who had found again her best friend, would never more let her struggle with want alone.
And so the children had gifts and dinner, and a merry, merry Christmas in the bright, warm, crimson-hung room, which had seemed to them such a paradise of delights when they looked down into it from their fourth-story window through the falling shadows of Christmas Eve.