Yet she cried over them when the girl was gone. Her very servants pitied the cruelly-oppressed little ones!
“I have been a hard, unsympathizing mother!” she thought, sobbingly. “God forgive me this, my sin!” She wiped away the tears, and resumed her task. “William will think I have lost my senses!” she ruminated, cramming an orange into the leg of the tightly-stuffed sock. “But I can’t help it, if he does!”
And, as if invoked by her unspoken thought, her husband, accoutred as I have described, stood before her.
“William!”
“Emily!”
The two detected culprits stared at one another for an instant, in unuttered, because unutterable amazement; then, as the truth dawned upon their minds, they burst into a fit of laughter that threatened to awake the dreamers.
“Hush-sh-sh!” said Mrs. Dryden, wiping away the tears of mirth that now hung where bitterer drops had trickled awhile ago, and pointing to the beds, “Let me see what you have been doing?”
The prudent economist could not repress a single exclamation of gentle reproof, as she examined the store. “William Dryden! And in these hard times, my dear!”
“Christmas comes but once a year, wifie! and then I had to make up for lost time, you know. I’ll tell you how it happened, and then you won’t blame me. I felt badly after tea, and came up to say a kind word to them”—nodding towards the brother and sister—“before they went to sleep, and, that door being ajar, I heard them talking”—
“And listened, as I did at that one!” cried Mrs. Dryden, throwing her arms around his neck, and beginning to cry afresh. “O husband! I have been so miserable ever since! have felt so guilty! Only to think, that I was teaching my children to hate me and to hate their home—making their lives wretched!”