“Merry Christmas!” Grace whispered.
“Same to you!” Mamma Lebed gripped her hand hard.
Grossmuter Schmalgemeire was filling stockings. There was no fireplace in her tiny home back of the shop, but a straight-backed chair did as well.
“He said a mouse would come in through the hole in the toe, Hans did,” she laughed. “But I told him an orange would fill it up. And so it shall. I found one in the street that is not too bad.”
And so Grace found them, these friends, on every hand. Poor, but making much of the little they had, and all filled to overflowing with the spirit of Christmas.
When she returned to her rooms, her cheeks were glowing. “Tonight,” she whispered, “I am like the moon, filled with light. The light of happiness. It is reflected happiness, but happiness all the same.”
And then, into her mind there flashed questions that had grown old, but were ever new: “Who is the Whisperer? Where is he? Why does he want Nida’s story?”
CHAPTER XXII
THE WARNING
In the meantime tremendous things were doing in the little house where Captain Burns had spent his childhood.
For a time, it is true, the silence in that little gray home out where the snow lay white and glistening on field and road continued.