“Bless the dear child!” said Anna Mary fervently. “Sure, Miss Beth, I’ve loved you from the first minyute I set my two eyes on you! Now don’t be thinkin’ sober thoughts so near Christmas and you but a slip of a girl! All you must think of now, dear little Miss Beth, is that you’re going to make fifty-three of these poor children perfectly happy at the tree; we’ve asked fifty-three, Miss Beth!” “Isn’t it splendid!” cried Beth, brightening. “But is it right to forget, Anna Mary?” “It wouldn’t be, if broodin’ over poverty did any good, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary sensibly. “But worryin’ never did, nor ever will help anything; more by token it works the other way, makin’ the worrier no good when the time does come to help. It’s plain now you’re meant to be a happy little girl, enjoyin’ what’s sent you with a grateful heart. It’s a mystery, Miss Beth, that one has and the other hasn’t, but so ’tis! The way I look at it is that God is a weaver, weavin’ our lives and all the world, and not one of us sees the pattern He’s set. But if we’re a gold thread in it, then we must let Him use us like pure shinin’ gold in the pattern. And if we’re just a bit of gray wool, or maybe cotton, we must let Him weave us in just as satisfied. Sure, when it’s all made and done with, what difference will it be whether we’re less or more?” “Oh, Anna Mary, what a lovely, lovely little sermon!” cried Beth. “I didn’t get the weavin’ idea out of my own head, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary honestly. “But it’s been a great comfort to me since first I saw it in a bit of po’try.” Beth ran up the steps of her uncle’s house, her seriousness dispelled by the last part of her drive. The gay splendor of the avenue late in the afternoon, the line of prancing horses and beautiful private motor cars, coming back from the park, the promenaders, the children so perfectly dressed, so rosy, so well-tended, swinging and pulling along on their uniformed attendants’ hands, who could believe that this city was the other side of the one Beth had just left and who, at eleven years old, could, or should, resist its brightness? “Say, Beth, the tree’s come!” cried Dirk from somewhere up-stairs the moment Beth was admitted. He slid down the banisters and came up like an acrobat, with a bow before her. “They’ve set the tree up in the music room. Mama decided we’d need the organ and piano and things; she’s had canvas laid to save the floor. That oak floor’s her joy. But maybe it isn’t a tree! Well, I guess! Come on and see it before you go up-stairs. How many poor kids did you catch?” “Fifty-three. We couldn’t possibly leave out any, and Aunt Alida said not to mind if there were a few over fifty,” said Beth, following Dirk. “Dirk, it’s exactly like the parable, going out into the highways and byways, you know, to make them come in to the feast.”