The colonel was not well, and had not yet appeared. Perhaps he wanted to see his boy first, alone, on his birthday.
Frans looked quite tender and softened when the interview was over. He was convinced that his father, at least, did love him very dearly, in spite of the trouble he was always giving. "Suppose—suppose," he thought to himself—"suppose I should turn over a new leaf, and really try to be better!"
He passed out into the garden and chanced to look up at Alma's window. She stood there with the yellow cottage in her hand, and was dropping something down the chimney. "There goes my present, I daresay," he thought, and again the bitter mood was uppermost, in spite of his father's kind words and the charming new home for his cabinet.
CHAPTER XI.
THE SLIDE.
Not the angel of death but the angel of beauty seemed to have made his rounds in the night. Not a tree nor a shrub had been passed by. The very dried weeds by the roadside were clothed in fairy garments. It was as if nature had been suddenly purified, exalted, made ready for translation. Alma looked out through her window,—not on the dark old oaks or the bare slender birches of yesterday. In feathery whiteness the oaks stood up before her, their hoary heads a crown of beauty, as in a sainted old age. The graceful birches stood in "half concealing, half revealing" pure drapery, as if shrouded in a bridal veil.
Round Karin's home the solemn evergreens had lost their gloom, and the white-robed branches drooped, as if to cast a double blessing on the passer-by.
Four noisy boys stormed out from the cottage door with a glad shout. They saw nothing of poetry or beauty or mystery in the wonders the hoar-frost had been working. They but remembered they were in the midst of the Christmas holidays, and to-day they were to finish, under the direction of Frans, the packing of the snow slope that led down to the frozen bay. There they were all to have a splendid time coasting on the long new sled that all had been busy in perfecting. "She," as the boys said, was a "grand affair," a "regular buster."
Similar thoughts had been uppermost with Nono, but they had now taken a different form. He was still inside the cottage, coaxing Karin to let Decima have her share in the frolic. He would hold fast to her himself, he said, and see that she came to no harm.