Dr. Pierce sat, most of the evening, holding Betsy in his lap, listening to her funny baby chatter and roaring at her escapades.  He took a great fancy to the Clark twins and made all manner of fun for the children by pretending that there was only one of them.  “Goodness; how you do fly about!” he would say ruefully to Dorothy, “An instant ago you were standing close beside me,” or “How can you be here on the couch,” he would say to Mabel, “when there you are as plain as a pikestaff standing up in the corner?”

“What can you do about that leg, Eli?” Mr. Westabrook asked Dr. Pierce once when Dicky swung across the room.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Dr. Pierce answered briskly.  “I guess Granny and Annie will have to let me take Dicky for a while.  A few months in my hospital and he’ll be jumping round here like a frog with the toothache.”

“Oh, Dr. Pierce, do you think you can cure him?” Mrs. Dore asked, clasping her hands.

“Cure him!” Dr. Pierce answered with his jolliest laugh.  “Of course we can.  He’s not in half so bad a condition as Maida was when we straightened her out.  Greinschmidt taught us a whole bag of tricks.  Dicky could almost mend himself if he’d only stay still long enough.  Look at Maida.  Would you ever think she’d been much worse than Dicky?”

Everybody stared hard at Maida, seated on her father’s knee, and she dimpled and blushed under the observation.  She was dressed all in white—­white ribbons, white sash, white socks and shoes, the softest, filmiest white cobweb dress.  Her hair streamed loose—­a cascade of delicate, clinging ringlets of the palest gold.  Her big, gray eyes, soft with the happiness of the long day, reflected the firelight.  Her cheeks had grown round as well as pink and dimpled.

She did not look sick.

“Oh, Dicky,” she cried, “just think, you’re going to be cured.  Didn’t I tell you when my father saw you, he’d fix it all right?  My father’s a magician!”

But Dicky could not answer.  He was gulping furiously to keep back the tears of delight.  But he smiled his radiant smile.  Billy took everybody’s attention away from him by turning an unexpected cartwheel in the middle of the floor.

Finally, Maida announced that it was time for the tree.  They formed in line and marched into the shop to a tune that Billy thumped out of the silver-toned old spinet.

I wish you could have heard the things the children said.

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The tree went close to the ceiling.  Just above it, with arms outstretched, swung a beautiful Christmas angel.  Hanging from it were all kinds of glittery, quivery, sparkly things in silver and gold.  Festooned about it were strings of pop corn and cranberries.  At every branch-tip glistened a long glass icicle.  And the whole thing was ablaze with candles and veiled in a mist of gold and silver.

At the foot of the tree, groups of tiny figures in painted plaster told the whole Christmas Day story from the moment of the first sight of the star by the shepherds who watched their flocks to the arrival, at the manger, of the Wise Men, bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.