So much pleasure and profit, many happy evenings, and an ever deeper love for their country, were some of the results of Jackie's bright idea.
NOW there came, warming the frosty heart of December, that delightful atmosphere of mystery and expectation which forms one pleasure of the great Yule-tide festival. The Big Brick House seemed particularly full of this happy spirit of the season. There were many mysterious shopping excursions, and much whispering in corners,--a thing not usual in this united family. Jackie showed a sudden and severe self-denial in the matter of sticks of pure chocolate, and was soon, therefore, able to proudly flourish a purse containing, he told his mother, "a dollar all but eighty-five cents," saved toward buying his presents for the family. He also spent much time at a little table in his own room, cutting out pictures and pasting them into a scrap-book for a little lame boy of his acquaintance.
Mrs. Merrithew and Kathie had each, besides innumerable other matters, a water-colour painting on hand. Each picture, strange to say, was of a house. Mrs. Merrithew's, the Big Brick House itself, with its trees and vines, was clearly intended for Daddy; but for whom, the children wondered, was Aunt Kathie's? It was a spirited little view of the old stone house on Saunder's Island; not so pretty a subject as Mrs. Merrithew's, but set in such a delicate atmosphere of early morning light that even the sombre gray of the stone seemed etherialized and made poetic. While Marjorie and Dora wondered for whom it was meant, Jackie promptly inquired,--but she, his dear Aunt Kathie, who had never refused to answer question of his before, only laughed and shook her head, and said that every one had secrets at Christmas-time.
Marjorie and Dora did not, as was their wont, spend all of their time together, for each was making a present for the other. Marjorie was working hard over a portfolio, which she knew was one of the things Dora wanted. She had carefully constructed and joined the stiff cardboard covers, and plentifully provided them with blotting-paper, and now she was embroidering the linen cover with autumnal maple-leaves in Dora's favourite colour, a rich, vivid red. As for Dora, though she had no love for needlework, she was laboriously making a cushion of soft, old-blue felt for Marjorie's cosey-corner, working it with a griffin pattern in golden-brown silks. Marjorie had a particular fancy for griffins,--partly, perhaps, because a griffin was the chief feature of the family crest.