in the family, they said, then it
would have been another matter. The truth was that Keith didn't care
very much either. He clapped hands and shouted excitedly, of course, but
his glances went sideways to the big sofa, where stood a huge hamper
piled to twice its own height with parcels, all wrapped in snow-white
paper and sealed with red sealing wax. The air of the room was charged
with the rich smell of newly melted wax, and to Keith that smell was
always the essence of Christmas, its chief symbol and harbinger.

During those few minutes in the parlour a dozen tall candles had been
lighted in the living-room, transforming the place that a moment before
seemed so dreary. The dining table was opened to its full length and
placed across the middle of the room, at right angles to the
chaiselongue where Keith slept nights. Cut glass dishes and silver-ware
shone in the light reflected from the spotlessly white table cloth. In
the centre stood the Christmas layer cake, its body four inches thick
and its top glistening with red and yellow and green pieces of
candied fruit.

Then began the little comedy regularly enacted every Christmas.

"Isn't Granny coming," the father asked. Then he turned to Lena. "Tell
her we are ready."

"She says she doesn't want to come in," Lena reported after a hasty
visit to the kitchen.

"You go and ask her for me, Keith," was the father's next suggestion.

"Thank you, dear," Granny said when Keith came to her with his message.
"But you tell your father that I think the kitchen is a much better
place for a useless old hag like myself."

"Suppose you go," the father said to his wife on hearing Keith's
modified version of Granny's reply.

"She says she really won't come in," the mother explained a minute
later. "You had better go out and ask her yourself, Carl. It is the one
thing she cannot resist."

The father went with a broad grin on his face. Keith laughed loudly and
nervously, his eyes on the huge cake. But the mother said
apologetically to Lena:

"Mamma is so funny about coming in here, although she knows how much we
want her."

"Here she is now," said Lena.

And the father appeared with Granny on his arm, and Granny was all
dressed up in her best skirt of black silk thick as cloth, with a cap of
black lace on her head.

"Really, I can't see what you want with an old thing like me in here,"
she continued protesting as she was being led to her seat beside Keith.
The girl sat