“Presents! What?”
“Well,” said Ricky, “I’m taking books. I know mother doesn’t care much for books, but the bookstore’s the only place I can get trusted.”
They turned over his books: Fiction, travel, biography, a new illustrated edition of the Bible—they were willing to admire his selection. And Grace said confusedly but appreciatively: “You know, the parlor bookcase has never had a thing in it excepting a green curtain over it!”
And they were all borne forward, well pleased.
Springvale has eight hundred inhabitants. As they drove through the principal street at six o’clock on that evening of December twenty-fourth, all that they expected to see abroad was the pop-corn wagon and a cat or two. Instead they counted seven automobiles and estimated thirty souls, and no one paid the slightest attention to them as strangers. Springvale was becoming metropolitan. There was a new church on one corner and a store-building bore the sign “Public Library.” Even the little hotel had a rubber-plant in the window and a strip of cretonne overhead.
The three men believed themselves to be a surprise. But, mindful of the panic to be occasioned by four appetites precipitated into a Springvale ménage, Grace had told. Therefore the parlor was lighted and heated, there was in the air of the passage an odor of brown gravy which, no butler’s pantry ever having inhibited, seemed a permanent savory. By the happiest chance, Mrs. Tilton had not heard their arrival nor—the parlor angel being in her customary eclipse and the kitchen grandfather’s clock wrong—had she begun to look for them. They slipped in, they followed Grace down the hall, they entered upon her in her gray gingham apron worn over her best blue serge, and they saw her first in profile, frosting a lemon pie. With some assistance from her, they all took her in their arms at once.
“Aren’t you surprised?” cried Edward in amazement.
“I haven’t got over being surprised,” she said placidly, “since I first heard you were coming!”
She gazed at them tenderly, with flour on her chin, and then she said: “There’s something you won’t like. We’re going to have the Christmas dinner to-night.”
Their clamor that they would entirely like that did not change her look.