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The hem of her long checkered apron then needed close scrutiny and folding for some unknown purpose, and this duty diverted her thoughts from the subject, but she turned to Dolly, who enjoyed this banter in her own quiet little way, which seldom rippled into a loud laugh, for her own quiet little face was too pale and too pinched to invite such freebooters. “Come, come, Little Scout,” she said. “Is she warm now, and were the rations good, and did she meet Kriss Kingle on his cold journey (with a caress of her pale little cheeks) with heaps of warm dresses, and heaps of pretty dolls, and heaps of sweetmeats too big to carry himself, so he asked her to carry some home to help him! Did she? (with another caress.) And would our Little Scout be sorry if he didn’t come himself to look after them and—-“

“Ah, that reminds me!” said David, quite audibly for him, and rising from the table with knife and fork still in hand.

“What reminds you, father?” asked the twins, in chorus.

“Why, coming home!” said David, not very intelligibly.

“What coming home?” again from the chorus, in expectant attitude.

“Why, Tom, I told you!” which he hadn’t done at all, but as by this time he was deep in the cupboard, where his overcoat hung, and as his voice was a little more muffled than usual, it was useless to argue the point, so the chorus loudly exclaimed,–

“Tom?”

“Yes, yes, yes!” from David, faintly and rather testily, as he had groped through his old coat, and had successively dropped the knife and fork, reeking with gravy, into the inside and outside pockets.

“To be sure! Tom coming home and I clean forgot it, what with the cold and the surprises,” he said again, emerging with the knife and fork in one hand and a letter in the other. “Here it is. He’ll be home to-morrow, he says, God willin’, and eat our turkey with us. Poor Tom, poor boy! He’s been away so long he’s forgot Griffin and hard times, or he wouldn’t say that!”

“Tom! Be home! and to-morrow?”–interruption of chorus as it reaches for the letter, opens and reads it aloud–Dolly being lifted in the sturdy arms of Molly to look over.

David, meanwhile, overcome by the toothsomeness of beefsteak, falls to again, while the others dance a sort of fandango, and turn up the rag carpet, and rattle the dishes on the dresser, and lift Dolly high in the air to the improvised tune of “Tom’s coming home! Tom’s coming home! Tom’s coming home to-morrow!”

“It’s another mouth to feed, but it’s hard to wish the poor boy back to Californy again,” huskily said David; then he exclaimed, as the noise increased, “Hey dey! Why, you’ll spill the coffee next, and cave in the walls, too, in a minute, and then there’ll be no home for Tom to come to!”

This was good humoredly added as the final swing was given to the dance, which brought the twins holding Dolly aloft in their arms laughing and panting on the settee.

“But tell us, father, is he coming home for good? He don’t say so in the letter,” asked Dolly, and all leaned forward to hear his answer.

“Coming home for good?” mused David. “Yes, he’s coming home for good, I hope; but I’m fearful he’ll find little beside the good in his sisters’ hearts.”

“Poor Tom,” said Dolly, with far-away eyes, “he’s had a weary life of it in the mines, I guess, poor fellow.”

“Yes, yes,” said David, “and that’s what makes it harder that we can’t greet him with a good Christmas to-morrow. Well, well, it’ll be a delight to see my poor boy again, hard times or no hard times, and we’ll be as cheerful as we can be and are now, thanks to my good girls,” and here he arose from the table, and, seating himself at the fire, opened a morning paper that he had found in the waste-basket in Mr. Griffin’s counting-house (and very worthless it must have been to be found there!) in which, through the kind offices of a massive old pair of spectacles, he was soon absorbed.