“My girl is with them downstairs—I’ll have to tell you what a Christmas we’ve made for them! The place looks like a toy-shop! Timmy, I hope they’ll always like her, be to her like the own brothers that she never had!” So much Mary said aloud. But to herself she was saying: “He doesn’t seem to know it, but that’s fully two ounces—three ounces—of good hot bread and milk he’s taken. Well, was it a riot?” she added to Cassie, who came quietly in to sit on the foot of the bed and study the invalid with loving and anxious smiling eyes.
“Mary, you should have seen it! It was too wonderful,” said Cassie, who had been crying. “I never saw anything like the expression on their little faces when I opened the door. Merle was absolutely white—Tom gave one yell! It was a sight—the candles all lighted, the floor heaped, the mantel loaded—I suppose there never was such a Christmas!”
“Cassie, you wouldn’t taste this? It is the most delicious milk-toast I ever tasted in my life!” Tim said.
“If it tastes good to you, dearest!”
“I don’t know how Molly makes it. Molly, do you suppose you would show Sigma how you do it?”
“I think so, Tim.” The women exchanged level quick glances of perfect comprehension, and there was heaven in their eyes.
“There isn’t any more downstairs?”
“I don’t know that I would now, Timmy,” dictatorial and imperious Doctor Madison said mildly. “You can have more when I get back from the hospital, say at about one. Now you have to sleep—lots, all the time, for days! I’m going to take all the children to my house for dinner and over night. You’re not to hear a sound. Look at the bowl, Cassie!”
She triumphantly inverted it. It was clean.
“Do you remember,” Mary Madison asked, holding her brother’s hands again, “do you remember years ago, when you used to eat my crusts for me, Timmy?”