But such petty catastrophes have no place in a heart overflowing with
joy. Nance did not even try to keep her twinkling feet from dancing;
she danced through the table-setting and through the dish-washing, and
between times she pressed her face to the dirty pane of the front
window to see if the hands on the big cathedral clock were getting any
nearer to five.
"They're goin' to have Christmas doin's over to the cathedral, too," she
cried excitedly. "The boards is off the new window, an' it's jus' like
the old one, an' ever'thing's lit up, an' it's snowin' like ever'thing!"
Mr. Demry's party was to take place between the time he came home from
the matinee and the time he returned for the evening performance. Long
before the hour appointed, his guests began to arrive, dirty-faced and
clean, fat and thin, tidy and ragged, big and little, but all wearing in
their eyes that gift of nature to the most sordid youth, the gift of
expectancy. There were fairies and ogres and pirates and Indians in
costumes that needed only the proper imagination to make them convincing.
If by any chance a wistful urchin arrived in his rags alone, Mr. Demry
promptly evolved a cocked hat from a newspaper, and a sword from a box
top, and transformed him into a prancing knight.
The children had been to Sunday-school entertainments where they had sat
in prim rows and watched grown people have all the fun of fixing the
tree and distributing the presents, but for most of them this was the
first Christmas that they had actually helped to make.
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