“My desk. It came last night. I moved all my things into it to-day,” Merle said. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas when a person gets their presents two days before,” she observed.
“His presents. Her presents,” corrected the governess.
“Her presents. Will your sister’s little girls have a tree?”
“Oh, my, yes! It’s a gorgeous tree!”
“And did you see my cousins while you were there?”
Miss Frothingham nodded. Her married sister lived next to Doctor Madison’s brother, a struggling young engineer with a small family, in a certain not-too-fashionable suburb. There had been a difference of opinion regarding a legacy, between the physician and her brother some years earlier, and a long silence had ensued, but Merle took a lively interest in the little cousins of whom she had only a hazy and wistful memory, and her mother had no objection to an occasional mention of them.
“I saw Rawley—that’s the second little boy—playing with my niece,” Miss Frothingham said. “And I saw Tommy—he’s older than you—taking care of the baby. I think he was going to the grocery for his mother; he was wheeling the baby very carefully. But I think those children are going to have a pretty sad Christmas because their Daddy is very sick, you know, and they all had whooping-cough, and I think their mother is too tired to know whether it’s Christmas or Fourth of July!”
“Maybe their father’s going to die like my father,” Merle suggested stoically. “I guess they won’t hang up their stockings,” she added suddenly.
For it had been reported that this was their custom, and Merle liked to lie awake in her little bed, warm and cosy on a winter night, and think thrillingly of what it would be to explore a bulging and lumpy stocking of her own.
Miss Frothingham looked doubtful. “I don’t suppose they will!” she opined.