Page:St. Nicholas - Volume 41, Part 1.djvu/125

1913.] “It ’s cold out here.” Inside, she looked at her watch. It was after seven. Only a little more than an hour, and the children would be at the end of their journey. Not much longer than that, and she would reach hers. It had been a tiresome  day for both Libby and Will'm. Although their eyes shone with the excitement of it, the sandman was not far away. It was their regular bedtime, and they were yawning. At a word from Miss Santa Claus, the porter brought pillows and blankets. She made up a bed for each on opposite seats, and tucked them snugly in.

“Now,” she said, bending over them, “you ’ll have time for a nice long nap before your father comes to take you off. But before you go to sleep, I want to tell you one more thing that you must remember forever: you must always get the right kind of start. It 's like hooking up a dress, you know. If you start crooked, it will keep on being crooked all the way down to the bottom, unless you undo it and begin over. So if I were you, I ’d begin to work that star-flower charm the first thing in the morning. Remember you can work it on anybody if you try hard enough. And remember that it is true, just as true as it is that you 're each going to have a Christmas stocking!”

She stooped over each in turn and kissed their eyelids down with a soft touch of her smiling lips that made Libby thrill for days afterward, whenever she thought of it. It seemed as if some royal spell had been laid upon them with these kisses: some spell to close their eyes to nettles and briers, and help them to see only the star-flowers.

In less than five minutes, both Libby and Will'm were sound asleep, and the porter was carrying the holly wreaths and the red coat and the suit-case back to the state-room which had been vacated at the last stopping-place. In two minutes more, Miss Santa Claus had emptied her suitcase out on the seat beside her, and was scrabbling over the contents in wild haste. Tor no sooner had she mentioned stockings to the children, than pop had come one of those messages straight from the sky road, which could not be disregarded. Knowing that she would be on the train with the two children from the Junction, Santa Claus was leaving it to her to provide stockings for them.

It worried her at first, for she could n't sce her way clear to doing it on such short notice and in such limited quarters. But she had never failed him since he had first allowed her the pleasure of helping him, and she did n’t intend to now. Her mind had to work as fast as her fingers. There was n’t a single thing among her belongings that she could make stockings of, unless—she sighed as she picked it up and shook out the folds of the prettiest kimono she had ever owned. It was the softest possible shade of gray with white cherry blossoms scattered over it, and it was bordered in wide bands of satin the exact color of a shining ripe red cherry. There was nothing else for it, the lovely kimono must be Vol. XLI—14.