“Why, Mother!” exclaimed Kate in frank dismay.  “Wasn’t everything all right?”

“I’m just so endurin’ mad,” sobbed Mrs. Bates, “that I could a-most scream and throw things.  Here I am, closer the end of my string than anybody knows.  Likely I’ll not see another Christmas.  I’ve lived the most of my life, and never knowed there was a time like that on earth to be had.  There wasn’t expense to it we couldn’t easy have stood, always.  Now, at the end of my tether, I go and do this for my grandchildren.  ’Tween their little shining faces and me, there kept coming all day the little, sad, disappointed faces of you and Nancy Ellen, and Mary, and Hannah, and Adam, and Andrew, and Hiram and all the others.  Ever since he went I’ve thought the one thing I couldn’t do was to die and face Adam Bates, but to-day I ain’t felt so scared of him.  Seems to me he has got about as much to account for as I have.”

Kate stood breathlessly still, looking at her mother.  Mrs. Bates wiped her eyes.  “I ain’t so mortal certain,” she said, “that I don’t open up on him and take the first word.  I think likely I been defrauded out of more that really counts in this world, than he has.  Ain’t that little roly-poly of Hannah’s too sweet?  Seems like I’ll hardly quit feeling her little sticky hands and her little hot mouth on my face when I die; and as she went out she whispered in my ear:  ’Do it again, Grandma, Oh, please do it again!’ an it’s more’n likely I’ll not get the chance, no matter how willing I am.  Kate, I am going to leave you what of my money is left —­ I haven’t spent so much —­ and while you live here, I wish each year you would have this same kind of a party and pay for it out of that money, and call it ‘Grandmother’s Party.’  Will you?”

“I surely will,” said Kate.  “And hadn’t I better have all of them, and put some little thing from you on the tree for them?  You know how Hiram always was wild for cuff buttons, and Mary could talk by the hour about a handkerchief with lace on it, and Andrew never yet has got that copy of ‘Aesop’s Fables,’ he always wanted.  Shall I?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bates.  “Oh, yes, and when you do it, Katie, if they don’t chain me pretty close in on the other side, I think likely I’ll be sticking around as near as I can get to you.”

Kate slipped a hot brick rolled in flannel to the cold old feet, and turning out the light she sat beside the bed and stroked the tired head until easy breathing told her that her mother was sound asleep.  Then she went back to the fireplace and sitting in the red glow she told Adam, 3d, part of what her mother had said.  Long after he was gone, she sat gazing into the slowly graying coals, her mind busy with what she had not told.