Since then, he had never failed to remember his hosts at Christmas time. He had never come again; he grew to be a famous man with whom it was an honor to be connected, but he was never too busy to remember the tastes of his cousins. Miss Mary’s father had had his magazine, her mother a bit of lace, Miss Mary’s brother a riding whip, Miss Mary herself a book. After the father died, two gifts came to Miss Mary’s mother; when all had gone but the lonely daughter, her gift was quadrupled. Of late years, the gift had increased—instead of four books, Miss Mary received twenty.
“You have now more time for reading,” wrote the cousin. “If my taste in books does not please you, you must tell me. It will be just as easy to send you what you like as what I like.”
Miss Mary had no quarrel with her cousin’s taste. If he had sent her a Greek dictionary, she would have treasured it. But he sent her the books she loved, novels, essays, poetry. With them came always a letter with reminders of that happy summer, and expressions of affection.
The box came usually on the last train on Christmas Eve. It was sometimes earlier, but it had never yet been late. Miss Mary always opened the box herself, with many failures of hammer and screwdriver to do proper execution, with excited examination of bindings, to see that no harm had come to them on their long journey, with pauses and exclamations while titles and frontispieces were examined. Miss Mary had this year a new bookcase for which she had been a long time saving the extra pennies that remained after baker’s and butcher’s bills were paid and the repairs made on the homestead and the outfit for the Arundel baby purchased. The bookcase was already half filled with the overflow from Miss Mary’s other bookcases.
Miss Mary woke on the morning of the day before Christmas with flushed cheeks and an accelerated pulse. This condition was no warning of approaching illness, it indicated only Miss Mary’s usual condition of excitement on this day. For three months past, the Arundel baby in the next room had wakened her drowsy hostess at the crack of dawn, but this morning Miss Mary was dressed before the Arundel baby had opened her brown eyes. Miss Mary’s excitement, however, was not entirely that of joyful anticipation; it was partly alarm. Each year, she prepared herself for disappointment, for the coming of the evening train without any precious freight for her. The cousin was old, ten years older than Miss Mary; he could not live to send her gifts on every Christmas, and when he died, when his box failed to come, she would be alone in the world, without kin, without interests beyond the sleepy village, with nothing to look forward to all her life long.
“I must be prepared for it,” Miss Mary often said to herself.
But she never succeeded in preparing herself. When she woke, she sprang from bed as she used to spring in her childhood.
“I am like the children who call out ‘Christmas gift’ and pound at the door,” said Miss Mary, amused at herself.
It was about nine o’clock when the Arundel baby’s aunt came for her. She was to have come at eight; she was, indeed, to have come yesterday and last week, and, indeed, last month. But the Arundel baby belonged to a weak and shiftless family.
She was much inconvenienced by the delay of the baby’s aunt. To the day before Christmas Miss Mary postponed various duties, her intention being to keep the hours as full as possible so that the time might not drag until the evening train.