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Stephen Archer and Other Tales by George MacDonald
page 48 of 331 (14%)
in some wonderful way, to her requiring no explanation, the baby Jesus
was born every Christmas Day afresh. What became of him afterwards she
did not know, and indeed she had never yet thought to ask how it was
that he could come to every house in London as well as No. 1, Wimborne
Square. Little of a home as another might think it, that house was yet
to her the centre of all houses, and the wonder had not yet widened
rippling beyond it: into that spot of the pool the eternal gift would
fall.

Her father forgot the time over his book, but so entranced was her
heart with the expectation of the promised visit, now so near--the day
after to-morrow--that, if she did not altogether forget to look for
him as she stepped down the stair from the church door to the street,
his absence caused her no uneasiness; and when, just as she reached
it, he opened the house-door in tardy haste to redeem his promise, she
looked up at him with a solemn, smileless repose, born of spiritual
tension and speechless anticipation, upon her face, and walking past
him without change in the rhythm of her motion, marched stately up the
stairs to the nursery. I believe the centre of her hope was that when
the baby came she would beg him on her knees to ask the Lord to
chasten her.

When dessert was over, her mother on the sofa in the drawing-room, and
her father in an easy-chair, with a bottle of his favourite wine by
his side, she crept out of the room and away again to the nursery.
There she reached up to her little bookshelf, and, full of the sermon
as spongy mists are full of the sunlight, took thence a volume of
stories from the German, the re-reading of one of which, narrating the
visit of the Christ-child, laden with gifts, to a certain household,
and what he gave to each and all therein, she had, although sorely
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