The carriage turned and went for a little space between brown fields and closely clipped hedgerows, and then madame saw the windows of her old home flashing back the morning sunlight over the high stone wall.  Again the carriage turned, into the lane this time, and now the sunlight was caught up by the scissors over the gate, and thrown dazzlingly down into their faces.

Monsieur smiled as he looked at Joyce, a tender, gentle smile that one would have supposed never could have been seen on those harsh lips.  She was almost standing up in the carriage, in her excitement.

“Oh, it has come true!” she cried, clasping her hands together, “The gates are really opening at last!”

Yes, the Ogre, whatever may have been its name, no longer lived.  Its spell was broken, for now the giant scissors no longer barred the way.  Slowly the great gate swung open, and the carriage passed through.  Joyce sprang out and ran on ahead to open the door.  Hand in hand, just as when they were little children, Martin and Desire, this white-haired brother and sister went back to the old home together; and it was Christmas Day, in the morning.

* * * * *

At five o’clock that evening the sound of Gabriel’s accordeon went echoing up and down the garden, and thirty little children were marching to its music along the paths, between the rows of blooming laurel.  Joyce understood, now, why the room where the Christmas tree stood had been kept so carefully locked.  For two days that room had been empty and the tree had been standing in Monsieur Ciseaux’s parlor.  Cousin Kate and madame and Berthe and Marie and Gabriel had all been over there, busily at work, and neither she nor Jules had suspected what was going on down-stairs.

Now she marched with the others, out of the garden and across the road, keeping time to the music of the wheezy old accordion that Gabriel played so proudly.  Surely every soul, in all that long procession filing through the gate of the giant scissors, belonged to the kingdom of loving hearts and gentle hands; for they were all children who passed through, or else mothers who carried in their arms the little ones who, but for these faithful arms, must have missed this Noel fete.

Jules had been carried down-stairs and laid on a couch in the corner of the room where he could see the tree to its best advantage.  Beside him sat his great-aunt, Desire, dressed in a satin gown of silvery gray that had been her mother’s, and looking as if she had just stepped out from the frame of the portrait up-stairs.  She held Jules’s hand in hers, as if with it she grasped the other Jules, the little brother of the olden days for whom this child had been named.  And she told him stories of his grandfather and his father.  Then Jules found that this Aunt Desire had known his mother; had once sat on the vine-covered porch while he ran after fireflies on the lawn in his little white dress; had heard the song the voice still sang to him in his dreams: