Madge looks thin and tired, and to-day--" the Doctor cleared his throat,
"I think she had been crying."

"Crying!" exclaimed Aunt Ellen, her kindly brown eyes warm with
sympathy. "Dear, dear!--And Christmas only three days off! Why, John,
dear, we must have them over here for Christmas. To be sure! And we'll
have a tree for little Roger and a Christmas masquerade and such a
wonderful Christmas altogether as he's never known before!" And Aunt
Ellen, with the all-embracing motherhood of her gentle heart aroused,
fell to planning a Christmas for Madge and Roger Hildreth that would
have gladdened the heart of the Christmas saint himself.

Face aglow, the old Doctor bent and patted his wife's wrinkled hand.

"Why, Ellen," he confessed, warmly, "it's the thing I most desired! Dear
me, it's a very strange thing indeed, my dear, how often we seem to
agree. I'll hitch old Billy to the sleigh and go straight after them now
while Annie's getting supper!" And at that instant one glance at Aunt
Ellen Leslie's fine old face, framed in the winter firelight which grew
brighter as the checkerboard window beside her slowly purpled, would
have revealed to the veriest tyro why the Doctor's patients liked best
to call her "Aunt" Ellen.

So, with a violent jingle of sleigh-bells, the Doctor presently shot
forth again into the white and quiet world, and as he went, gliding
swiftly past the ghostly spruces by the roadside, oddly enough, despite
his cheerful justification to Aunt Ellen, he was fiercely rebelling at
the defection of his children. John and his lovely wife might well have
foregone their fashionable ball. And Howard and Philip--their
holiday-keeping Metropolitan clubs were shallow artificialities surely