boy by the window, the Doctor bustled
cheerily indoors and with kindly eyes averted from the single tell-tale
sauce-pan upon the fire, over which Madge Hildreth had bent with sudden
color, fell to bustling about with a queer lump in his throat and
talking ambiguously of Aunt Ellen's Christmas orders, painfully
conscious that the girl's dark face had grown pitifully white and tense
and that Roger's wan little face was glowing. And when the fire was
damped by the Doctor himself, and his Christmas guests hustled into
dazed, protesting readiness, the Doctor deftly muffled the thin little
fellow in blankets and gently carried him out to the waiting sleigh with
arms that were splendid and sturdy and wonderfully reassuring.

"There, there, little man!" he said cheerfully, "we've not hurt the poor
lame leg once, I reckon. And now we'll just help Sister Madge blow out
the lamp and lock the door and be off to Aunt Ellen!"

But, strangely enough, the Doctor halted abruptly in the doorway and
turned his kindly eyes away to the shadowy pines. And Sister Madge, on
her knees by Roger's bed, sobbing and praying in an agony of relief,
presently blew out the lamp herself and wiped her eyes. For nights among
the whispering pines are sleepless and long when work is scarce and
Christmas hovers with cold, forbidding eyes over the restless couch of a
dear and crippled brother.

II

Wishing Sparks

Round the Doctor's house frolicked the brisk, cold wind of a Christmas
eve, boisterously rattling the luminous checkerboard windows and the
Christmas wreaths, tormenting the cheerful flame in the old iron lantern
and whisking away the snow from the shivering elms, whistling eerily
down the Doctor's chimney to startle a strange little cripple by the
Doctor's fire, who, queerly enough, would not be startled.

For to Roger there had never been a wind so Christmasy, or a fire so
bright and warm, and his solemn black eyes glowed! Never a wealth of
holly and barberry and alder-berries so crimson as that which rimmed the
snug old house in Christmas flame! Never such evergreen wreaths, for,
tucked up here in this very chair by Aunt Ellen, he had made them all
himself of boughs from the evergreen forest! And never surely such
enticing odors as had floated out for the last two days from old Annie's
pots and pans as she baked and roasted and boiled and stewed in endless
preparation for Christmas day and the Christmas eve party, scolding away
bet