Colonel Fortescue rose, too; he could not be less brave than his wife and daughter.  Anita kissed him tenderly; a soft-hearted deserter always takes an affectionate leave of his comrades when he is about to desert.

At the ball Colonel and Mrs. Fortescue were composed, smiling, graceful; Anita was less shy, more laughing than usual.  When Broussard entered the ball-room he was greeted with a great roar of applause, and when he danced the first dance with Anita once more there was applause and something in the eyes of the smiling, handclapping crowd that brought the ever-ready color into Anita’s delicately lovely face.  It was a beautiful ball, as all military balls are, and lasted late.  When the C. O. and Mrs. Fortescue and Anita got home it was Christmas morning, and the stars that led the Magi to the crib at Bethlehem were shining gloriously in the blue-black sky.

At daybreak began the hullabaloo which attends Christmas morning in a house where there is an adored child, and only one.  The After-Clap, with the preternatural knowledge claimed for him by Kettle, knew that it was Christmas morning and a day of riot and license for him.

At an early hour he began to storm the earth and stun the air.  There was a Christmas tree for him and for the eight McGillicuddies, and the day was so full that Mrs. Fortescue found it hard to get time in which to give Kettle the necessary wigging for taking the baby from his bed and carrying him out of doors at eight o’clock in the evening because he waked up and said “Horsey.”  In vain Kettle pleaded “fo’ Gord—­” always a forerunner of a tarradiddle—­that he “didn’t have no notion on the blessed yearth as Miss Betty would mind,” and also wept copiously when Mrs. Fortescue frankly told him that he was a tarradiddler, and made, for the hundredth time, a very awful threat to Kettle.

“But I can tell you this much,” she said, with great severity, “that if you keep on doing everything the baby tells you to do, I will buy you a ticket back to Virginia and send you home.  Do you understand me?”

At this, a smile rivalling a rainbow suddenly overspread Kettle’s face and his mouth came open like an alligator’s.

“Lord, yes, I understand you, Miss Betty,” Kettle replied, with a chuckle.  “I knows when you is bullyraggin’ me an’ say you is goin’ to sen’ me back to Virginia, you is jes’ jokin’.  You done tole me that too oftin, Miss Betty, an’ you ain’t never give me no ticket yet, an’ ‘tain’t nothin’ but a sign you is comin’ roun’, Miss Betty.”

Kettle’s grin was so seductive and his reasoning so correct that Mrs. Fortescue suddenly laughed, too; there was no way short of putting Kettle in handcuffs and leg-irons to keep him from obeying the After-Clap, whose orders were orders to Kettle.