She opened the oven door. The hot, delicious odor of its precious contents gushed out. Did ever goose brown so perfectly before? And how large the liver was! It lay in the gravy in one corner of the big dripping-pan, just beginning to curl at the edges. She tested it carefully with a little three-tined iron fork. The mince-pie was on the table, waiting to be warmed, and the pumpkin-pie was out on the back porch,—from which the cat had been excluded for the present. The cranberry sauce, the celery in its high, old-fashioned glass, the little bee-hive of hard sauce for the pudding and the thick cream for the coffee, bore the pumpkin-pie company. The currant jelly in the tarts glowed like great red rubies set in circles of old gold; the mashed potatoes were light and white as foam. For one moment, as she stood there in the savory kitchen, she thought of the thin, worn flannels, and how much better her rheumatism would be with the warm ones which could have been bought with the money spent for this dinner. Then she flushed with self-shame. “I must be gittin’ childish,” she exclaimed, indignantly; “to begredge a Chris’mas dinner to ’Lizy. ’S if I hedn’t put up with old underclo’s afore now! But I will say there ain’t many women o’ my age thet c’u’d git up a dinner like this ’n’,—rheumatiz an’ all.” A long, shrill whistle announced the last train from the city. Mrs. Risley started and turned pale. A violent trembling seized her. She could scarcely get to the window, she stumbled so. On the way she stopped at the old walnut bureau to put a lace cap on her white hair and to look anxiously into the mirror. “Five year!” she whispered. “It’s an offul spell to go without seein’ your only daughter! Everything’ll seem mighty poor an’ shabby to her, I reckon,—her old mother worst o’ all. I never sensed how I’d changed tell now. My! how no-account I’m a gittin’! I’m all of a trimble!” Then she stumbled on to the window and pressed her cheek against the pane. “They’d ort to be in sight now,” she said. But the minutes went by, and they did not come. “Mebbe they’ve stopped to talk, meetin’ folks,” site said, again. “But they’d ort to be in sight now.” She trembled so she had to get a chair and sit down. But still she wrinkled her cheek upon the cold pane and strained her dim eyes down the street. After a while a boy came whistling down from the corner. There was a letter in his hand. He stopped and rapped, and when she opened the door with a kind of frightened haste, he gave her the letter and went away, whistling again. A letter! Why should a letter come? Her heart was beating in her throat now,—that poor old heart that had beaten under so many sorrows! She searched in a dazed way for her glasses. Then she fell helplessly into a chair and read it: