Suddenly she picked up an alien from the carefully chosen mass that lay about her, a cheap little card that she knew she had never bought. Either she or the sales girl must have caught it up by mistake with some of the others. It was a commonplace little card of the folder variety that carries a sentimental verse inside. Alice opened it mechanically before tossing it into the waste basket. And there beneath her eyes were these words:
Oh what, my dear, of Christmas cheer could any one wish more,
Than candle-light and you within, and holly at the door!
She stared at the words unbelievingly. Not for thirty years had she thought of that old song. And now suddenly she heard it in her father’s voice, just as he used to sing it Christmas after Christmas as he went through the house with his hammer in one hand and a dangling bough of green in the other.
And holly at the door, and holly at the door!
With candle-light and you within, and holly at the door!
She hummed the old melody under her breath, and then she found herself bending over the desk, face in hands, weeping, while over her swept great waves of homesickness, poignant pangs of yearning for a place and a time that had drifted out of her consciousness.
At last she raised her head and leaned it against the high back of the chair. It seemed almost as though invisible fingers had pressed it there, had closed her eyes, had made the pen drop from her passive hand. All at once she was back in the little town of her childhood where she had not been, and where not even her mind had traveled vividly, these long years.
Christmas time in Martinsville! Christmas in the small frame house that had been home. Mother singing blithely as she stuffed the turkey in the kitchen. Father standing proudly by, watching her every movement. For the turkey was an event. One turkey a year, to be ordered after due consideration from one of the farmers near town, to be received with a small flurry of excitement when it arrived and to be picked and prepared for the oven by Mother’s own skilful fingers.
“I suppose we should ask Miss Amanda for dinner to-morrow. The Smiths usually have her but they’re away this year,” Mother was saying.