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.

In the afternoon Colonel Fortescue, sitting in his office, from which
not even Christmas Day e