The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it.  He looked thin and very serious.  Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—­and to be burdened with a family!  He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail.  His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her.  It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for.  He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way.  I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present.  It’ll grow out again—­you won’t mind, will you?  I just had to do it.  My hair grows awfully fast.  Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy.  You don’t know what a nice—­what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Delia.  “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow?  I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Delia.  “It’s sold, I tell you—­sold and gone, too.  It’s Christmas Eve, boy.  Be good to me, for it went for you.  Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you.  Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake.  He enfolded his Della.  For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction.  Eight dollars a week or a million a year—­what is the difference?  A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer.  The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.  This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me.  I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less.  But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper.  And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs—­the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window.  Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims—­just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair.  They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession.  And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.