With a trembling movement the little locket was taken from the box and opened and the picture in it kissed passionately; then, without warning, the child crumpled up and hot tears fell fast over the quivering face.  “I do want you, my mother!  Everybody wants a mother at Christmas, and I haven’t had one since I was seven.  Father tries to fill my stocking, but it isn’t a mother-stocking, and I just ache and ache to—­to have one like you’d fix.  I want—­” The words came tremblingly, and presently she sat up.

“Carmencita Bell, you are a baby.  Behave—­your—­self!” With the end of the gingham apron the big blue eyes were wiped.  “You can’t do much in this world, but you can keep from crying.  Suppose Father was to know.”  Her back straightened and her head went up.  “Father isn’t ever going to know, and if I don’t fill this stocking it won’t be hanging on the end of the mantelpiece when he wakes up.  The locket must go in the toe.”

CHAPTER XVII

In half an hour the stocking, big and bulging, was hung in its accustomed place, the packages for her father put on a chair by themselves, and those for her left on the table, and as she rearranged the latter something about the largest one arrested her attention, and, stopping, she gazed at it with eyes puzzled and uncertain.

It looked—­Cautiously her fingers were laid upon it.  Undoubtedly it looked like the box in which had been put the beautiful dark-blue coat she had bought for the little friend of her friend.  And that other box was the size of the one the two dresses had been put in; and that was a hat-box, and that a shoe-box, and the sash and beads and gloves and ribbons, all the little things, had been put in a box that size.  Every drop of blood surged hotly, tremblingly, and with eyes staring and lips half parted her breath came unsteadily.

In the confusion of their coming she had not noticed when Mrs. Robinsky had brought them up and put them under the cot, with the injunction that they were not to be opened until the morning, and for the first time their familiarity was dawning on her.  Could it be—­could she be the little friend he had said was rich?  She wasn’t rich.  He didn’t mean money-rich, but she wasn’t any kind of rich; and she had been so piggy.

Hot color swept over her face, and her hands twitched.  She had told him again and again she was getting too much, but he had insisted on her buying more, and made her tell him what little girls liked, until she would tell nothing more.  And they had all been for her.  For her, Carmencita Bell, who had never heard of him three days before.

In the shock of revelation, the amazement of discovery, the little figure at the table stood rigid and upright, then it relaxed and with a stifled sob Carmencita crossed the room and, by the side of her cot, twisted herself into a little knot and buried her face in her arms and her arms in the covering.