“It will be a new kind of Christmas tree,” observed the doctor. “But she’s a cunning little one—she deserves to be kept alive.”
“Indeed she does,” Dorothy said, “and I’m glad if I can help any.”
“Why I never would have thought of the plan,” said the doctor. “I had been thinking all the time we ought to do something, but Wolters’s Christmas gift never crossed my mind. Here we are. My, but this is a great place!” he finished. And the next moment Dorothy had jumped out of the cutter and was at the door of Mr. Ferdinand Wolters.
CHAPTER VI
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Dorothy was scolded. There her own family—father, Joe and Roger, to say nothing of dear Aunt Winnie, and the cousins Ned and Nat—were waiting for her important advice about a lot of Christmas things, and she had ridden off with Dr. Gray, attending to the gloomy task of having a sick child and her mother placed in a sanitarium.
But she succeeded, and when on the following day she visited Emily and her mother, she found the nurses busy in an outer hall, fixing up the Christmas tree that Mr. Sanders had insisted upon bringing all the way from the farmhouse where Dorothy had left it for little Emily.
The very gifts that Dorothy left unopened out there, when she found the child sick, the nurses were placing on the tree, waiting to surprise Emily when she would open her eyes on the real Christmas day.
And there had been added to these a big surprise indeed, for Mr. Wolters was so pleased with the result of his charity, that he added to the hospital donation a personal check for Mrs. Tripp and her daughter. The check was placed in a tiny feed bag, from which a miniature horse (Emily’s pet variety of toy) was to eat his breakfast on Christmas morning.
Major Dale did not often interfere with his daughter’s affairs, but this time his sister, Mrs. White, had importuned him, declaring that Dorothy would take up charity work altogether if they did not insist upon her taking her proper position in the social world. It must be admitted that the kind old major believed that more pleasure could be gotten out of Dorothy’s choice than that of his well-meaning, and fashionable, sister. But Winnie, he reflected, had been a mother to Dorothy for a number of years, and women, after all, knew best about such things.
It was only when Dorothy found the major alone in his little den off his sleeping rooms that the loving daughter stole up to the footstool, and, in her own childish way, told him all about it. He listened with pardonable pride, and then told Dorothy that too much charity is bad for the health of growing girls. The reprimand was so absurd that Dorothy hugged his neck until he reminded her that even the breath of a war veteran has its limitations.