feel a little tremble in my knees as I read
it. He must be better, or he'd never be able to travel. To-morrow will
be Christmas Day, but we've decided to postpone all celebration until
the kiddies' daddy is on the scene. It will never seem much like
Christmas to us Eskimos, at eighty-five in the shade. And we're
temporarily subduing that red-ink day to the eyes of the children by
carefully secreting in one of Peter's clothes-closets each and every
present that has come for them.

_Sunday the Twenty-seventh_

Dinky-Dunk is here. He arrived this morning, and we were all at the
station in our best bib-and-tucker and making a fine show of being
offhanded and light-hearted. But when I saw the porter helping down my
Diddums, so white-faced and weak and tired-looking, something swelled
up and burst just under my floating ribs and for a moment I thought my
heart had had a blow-out like a tire and stopped working for ever and
ever. Heaven knows I held my hands tight, and tried to be cheerful,
but in spite of everything I could do, on the way home, I couldn't
stop the tears from running slowly down my cheeks. They kept running
and running, as though I had nothing to do with it, exactly as a wound
bleeds. The poor man, of course, was done out by the long trip. He was
just _blooey_, and saved himself from being pitiful by shrinking back
into a shell of chalky-faced self-sufficiency. He has said very
little, and has eaten nothing, but had a sleep this afternoon for a
couple of hours, out in the _patio_ on a _chaise-longue_. It hurt him,
I think, to find his own children look at him with such cold and
speculative eyes. But he has changed shockingly since they last saw
him. And they have so much to fill up their little lives. They haven't
yet reached the age when life teaches them they'd better stick to
what's given them, even though there's a bitter tang to its sweetness!

_Wednesday the Thirtieth_

It is incredible, what three days of rest and forced feeding at my
implacable hands, have done for Dinky-Dunk. He is still a little shaky
on his pins, if he walks far, and the noonday sun makes him dizzy, but
his eyes don't look so much like saucers and I haven't heard the trace
of a cough from him all to-day. Illness, of course, is not romantic, but
it plays its altogether too important part in life, and has to be faced.
And there is something so disturbingly immuring and depe