paper
burdens, were hurrying home.

They stumbled home, too spent to talk. Fanny, groping for the keyhole,
stubbed her toe against a wooden box between the storm door and the
inner door. It had evidently been left there by the expressman or a
delivery boy. It was a very heavy box.

"A Christmas present!" Fanny exclaimed. "Do you think it is? But it must
be." She looked at the address, "Miss Fanny Brandeis." She went to the
kitchen for a crowbar, and came back, still in her hat and coat. She
pried open the box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a
gleaming leather-bound set of Balzac, and beneath that, incongruously
enough, Mark Twain.

"Why!" exclaimed Fanny, sitting down on the floor rather heavily. Then
her eye fell upon a card tossed aside in the hurry of unpacking. She
picked it up, read it hastily. "Merry Christmas to the best daughter in
the world. From her Mother."

Mrs. Brandeis had taken off her wraps and was standing over the
sitting-room register, rubbing her numbed hands and smiling a little.

"Why, Mother!" Fanny scrambled to her feet. "You darling! In all that
rush and work, to take time to think of me! Why--" Her arms were around
her mother's shoulders. She was pressing her glowing cheek against
the pale, cold one. And they both wept a little, from emotion, and
weariness, and relief, and enjoyed it, as women sometimes do.

Fanny made her mother stay in bed next morning, a thing that Mrs.
Brandeis took to most ungracefully. After the holiday rush and strain
she invariably had a severe cold, the protest of the body she had
over-driven and under-nourished for two or three weeks. As a patient she
was as trying and fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get
up, demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. She fretted
about the business, and imagined that things were at a stand-still
during her absence.

Fanny herself rose early. Her healthy young body, after a night's sleep,
was already recuperating from the month's strain. She had planned a
real Christmas dinner, to banish the memory of the hasty and unpalatable
lunches they had had to gulp during the rush. There was to be a turkey,
and Fanny had warned Annie not to touch it. She wanted to stuff it and
roast it herself. She spent the morning in the kitchen, aside from an
occasional tip-toeing visit to her mother's room. At eleven she found
her mother up, and no amount of coaxing would induce her to go back to
bed.