“SO THE CARPENTER ENCOURAGED THE GOLDSMITH”
They were all to spend Christmas eve with us, our nearest and dearest. On Christmas day even the kinfolk farthest removed, both as to kin and to kind, have a right by virtue of red holly to one’s companionship. But Christmas eve is for the meeting of one’s dearest and they had all been summoned to our house: The Chartres, the Cleatams, Miss Willie Lillieblade, Hobart Eddy, Avis and Lawrence, and Enid and David and the baby. As for Viola and Our Telephone and Lisa and Eric they were all in Naples and I dare say looking in each other’s eyes as if Vesuvius were a mere hill.
There was to be with us one other—Eunice Wells, who was lame. She was in New York on the pleasant business of receiving a considerable legacy from a relative, a friend of ours, whose will, though Eunice had previously been unknown to Pelleas and me, endeared her to us.
“To my beloved niece, Eunice Wells,” the testament went, “I give and bequeath This and That for her piety, her love of learning and her incomparable courage in bearing sorrow.”
Was not that the living May breathing in a rigid and word-bound instrument of the law? And what a picture of Eunice Wells. Pelleas and I had sought her out, welcomed her, and bidden her on Christmas eve to dine with us alone and to grace our merry evening.
At five o’clock on the day before Christmas, just as Pelleas and I rested from holly hanging and were longing for our tea, Hobart Eddy was announced. I say “announced” because we usually construe Nichola’s smile at our drawing-room door to mean Hobart Eddy. She smiles for few but to Hobart she is openly complaisant, unfolding from the leather of her cheek an expression of real benignity.
“How very jolly you look,” he said, as we sat in the ingle. “Holly over the blindfold Hope and down the curtains and, as I live, mistletoe on the sconces. Aunt Etarre, I shall kiss you from sconce to sconce.”
“Do,” said I; “of late Pelleas is grown appallingly confident of my single-minded regard.”
“Alas,” Hobart said, “nobody wants to kiss me for myself alone.”
On which he put back his head and sat looking up at the blindfold Hope, wreathed with holly. And his fine, square chin without threat of dimple, and his splendid, clear-cut face, and his hand drooping a little from the arm of his chair sent me back to my old persistent hope. Heaven had manifestly intended him to be a Young Husband. He of all men should have been sitting before his own hearth of holly and later making ready the morrow’s Yule-tree for such little hearts as adore Yule-trees....