Suddenly she shook her head as if to get rid of some importunate thought. "But we were going to unpack," said she. "Pretty subjects these for Christmas Eve! Come to our box--ours I say. You have bewitched me with your dream about America."
"We will make it come true," he impetuously cried. "I shall remind you on some future day of our first Christmas Eve, and then you will be obliged to confess that I have more courage, and am a better prophet than you."
She made no reply, but cut the last string and opened the box. All sorts of small presents came to view, a pair of woollen gloves that his eldest sister had knitted for him, a watch-chain woven of the fair hair of the younger, with a pretty little gold key hanging to it, home-made gingerbread, and finally a large sealed bottle.
"Have you vineyards?" asked she playfully.
He laughed in spite of all his sadness. "It is elder wine, and the grapes grow in our little garden. As a child I thought it the best of all things, and ever since my good mother believes she cannot please me better than by sending me on every Christmas Eve, and every birthday, a sample at least of her last year's making."
"I hope it tastes better to you than the most costly Rhine wine," said she earnestly, "or you would not deserve it. Look--there are letters."
"Will you look them over? I am too much distracted. I should not know what they were about if I read them."
She had seated herself on the sofa, and taken the letters on her knee; one after the other she read them with most devout attention, as though their contents were wonderful and sublime, yet they were only made up of sisters' chat; little jests, apologies for the insignificance of their offerings; and in the lines written by the mother, there was traceable, together with her pride in having so good a son, her sorrow at being unable to embrace him at such a time, and her anxious fear that it was not so much work that kept him away, but rather the melancholy unsocial mood which even made his letters short.
"Are you still reading them?" he at length asked. "They are simple people, and when they write, the best that is in them does not always get put on paper. Good God! thou art weeping, Lottka!"
She laid the letters on the box, rose hurriedly, and pressed back the tears that still welled from between her long eye-lashes. "I will go now," she faintly said. "I shall be better out of doors."