Roberta had the cover off.  Roses!  Somehow she had known they would be roses—­after last night.  But such roses!

Ruth cried out in ecstasy, bending to bury her face in the glorious mass.  “They’re exactly the colour of the old brocade frock, Robby,” she exulted.  She picked up the card in its envelope.  “May I look at it?” she asked, with her fingers already in the flap.  “Ours all have some Christmas wish on, and Rosy’s adds something about Gordon and Dorothy.”

“You might just let me see first,” said Roberta carelessly, stretching out her hand for the card.  Ruth handed it over.  Roberta turned her head.  “Who’s calling?” she murmured, and ran to the door, card in hand.

“I didn’t hear any one,” Ruth called after her.

But Roberta disappeared.  Around the turn of the hall she scanned her card.

“Thorns to the thorny,” she read, and stood staring at the unexpected words written in a firm, masculine hand.  That was all.  Did it sting?  Yet, curiously enough, Roberta rather liked that odd message.

When she came back, Ruth, in the excitement of examining many other Christmas offerings, had rushed on, leaving the box of roses on Roberta’s bed.  The recipient took out a single rose and examined its stem.  Thorns!  She had never seen sharper ones—­and not one had been removed.  But the rose itself was perfection.

CHAPTER X

OPINIONS AND THEORIES

Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray were the last to leave the city, after the house-party.  They returned to their brother Robert’s home for a day, when the other guests had gone, and it was on the evening before their departure that they related their experiences while at the house of Matthew Kendrick.  With most of the members of the Gray household, they were sitting before the fire in the living-room when Aunt Ruth suddenly spoke her mind.

“I don’t know when I’ve felt so sorry for the too rich as I felt in that house,” said she.  She was knitting a gray silk mitten, and her needles were flying.

“Why, Aunt Ruth?” inquired her nephew Louis, who sat next her, revelling in the comfort of home after a particularly harassing day at the office.  “Did they seem to lack anything in particular?”

“I should say they did,” she replied.  “Nothing that money can buy, of course, but about everything that it can’t.”

“For instance?” he pursued, turning affectionate eyes upon his aunt’s small figure in its gray gown, as the firelight played upon it, touching her abundant silvering locks and making her eyes seem to sparkle almost as brilliantly as her swiftly moving needles.

Aunt Ruth put down her knitting for an instant, looking at her nephew.  “Why, you know,” said she.  “You’re sitting in the very middle of it this minute!”