“If it wasn’t him,” Ruby mutters. “If it was anybody else but the wicked old one; but I can’t be kind to him.”
“On earth peace, good will toward men!” Clearer and clearer rings out the angel benison, sent from the gates of heaven, where Ruby’s mother waits to welcome home again the husband and child from whose loving arms she was so soon called away. To be “kind,” that is what Ruby has decided “good will” means. Is she, then, being kind, to the old man whose groping hands appeal so vainly to her aid?
“Dad wouldn’t like me to,” decides Ruby, trying to stifle the voice of conscience. “And he’s such a horrid old man.”
Clearer and still clearer, higher and still higher rings out the angels’ singing. There is a queer sort of tugging going on at Ruby’s heart. She knows she ought to go back to help old Davis and yet she cannot—cannot!
Then a great flash of light comes before her eyes, and Ruby suddenly wakens to find herself in her own little bed, the white curtains drawn closely to ward off mosquitoes, and the morning sun slanting in and forming a long golden bar on the opposite curtain.
The little girl rubs her eyes and stares about her. She, who has so often even doubted reality, finds it hard to believe that what has passed is really a dream. Even yet the angel voices seem to be sounding in her ears, the heavenly light dazzling her eyes.
“And they weren’t angels, after all,” murmurs Ruby in a disappointed voice. “It was only a dream.”
Only a dream! How many of our so-called realities are “only a dream,” from which we waken with disappointed hearts and saddened eyes. One far day there will come to us that which is not a dream, but a reality, which can never pass away, and we shall awaken in heaven’s morning, being “satisfied.”
“Dad,” asks Ruby as they go about the station that morning, she hanging on her father’s arm, “what was my mamma like—my own mamma, I mean?”
The big man smiles, and looks down into the eager little face uplifted to his own.