ried, clasping her hands together, "The
gates are really opening at last!"

Yes, the Ogre, whatever may have been its name, no longer lived. Its
spell was broken, for now the giant scissors no longer barred the way.
Slowly the great gate swung open, and the carriage passed through. Joyce
sprang out and ran on ahead to open the door. Hand in hand, just as when
they were little children, Martin and Desire, this white-haired brother
and sister went back to the old home together; and it was Christmas Day,
in the morning.

* * * * *

At five o'clock that evening the sound of Gabriel's accordeon went
echoing up and down the garden, and thirty little children were
marching to its music along the paths, between the rows of blooming
laurel. Joyce understood, now, why the room where the Christmas tree
stood had been kept so carefully locked. For two days that room had been
empty and the tree had been standing in Monsieur Ciseaux's parlor.
Cousin Kate and madame and Berthe and Marie and Gabriel had all been
over there, busily at work, and neither she nor Jules had suspected what
was going on down-stairs.

Now she marched with the others, out of the garden and across the road,
keeping time to the music of the wheezy old accordion that Gabriel
played so proudly. Surely every soul, in all that long procession filing
through the gate of the giant scissors, belonged to the kingdom of
loving hearts and gentle hands; for they were all children who passed
through, or else mothers who carried in their arms the little ones who,
but for these faithful arms, must have missed this Noel fete.

Jules had been carried down-stairs and laid on a couch in the corner of
the room where he could see the tree to its best advantage. Beside him
sat his great-aunt, Desire, dressed in a satin gown of silvery gray that
had been her mother's, and looking as if she had just stepped out from
the frame of the portrait up-stairs. She held Jules's hand in hers, as
if with it she grasped the other Jules, the little brother of the olden
days for whom this child had been named. And she told him stories of his
grandfather and his father. Then Jules found that this Aunt Desire had
known his mother; had once sat on the vine-covered porch while he ran
after fireflies on the lawn in his little white dress; had heard the
song the voice still sang to him in his dreams:

"Till the stars and the angels come to keep
Their watch w