It was a shawl, but such a one as no Wescott had ever looked upon. At first its lacy fretwork seemed indistinct and fantastic, like the frost on a January windowpane. But as the children with careful fingers lifted portions of it to look through its tiny squares and to marvel at its fineness, they saw that pictures were woven within it--pictures in delicate traceries of birds, butterflies, and flowers. Then Mary Christmas swept it suddenly from their mother’s shoulders and held it widespread against her black skirt; and lo! across the high centre of it a flock of birds was winging its way as though across great stretches of sky. In the lower centre swarms of butterflies danced and hovered and poised among hundreds of flowers. But the corners, as Mary Christmas showed them each in turn, were the most wonderful of all. In the first, some tired sheep rested under a great tree; in the second, the moon and stars looked down upon a silent hill; a child danced in the third among falling flower-petals; in the last, a branching rosebush clambered over a high wall and sent sprays of swaying blossoms into some hidden garden. And as they looked at it and marveled, that same richly laden fragrance stole from it like an invisible presence and drifted away up the wide-mouthed fireplace, among the musty leaves of their father’s old books, and through the open window into the June sunlight. “I made it,” said Mary Christmas, throwing it again over Mrs. Wescott’s shoulders; “some in Erzerum, some in Portland last winter--I made it. Now it is yours!” “I can’t take it,” cried Mrs. Wescott, finding her voice with a great effort. “It’s too lovely for me--and all that work, too! John, tell her I can’t take it.” But Mr. Wescott, astute in so many things, was really positively stupid about that shawl. He just stood and stared at his wife quite as though he had not seen her nearly every day for thirteen years, and made only the feeblest of protests as a weak echo to her own. Mary Christmas paid not the slightest heed to their remonstrances, except to shake her hands in a peculiarly final gesture. She was wholly concerned now with her gift for Mr. Wescott. Now Father Wescott afforded a real problem. For him whom Mary Christmas most delighted to honor, what gift among all the articles in her great bundle was in the least suitable? She made a puzzled movement toward the stockings and suspenders, but drew back dissatisfied. She fingered cards of cuff buttons, combs in leather pockets, collars of all sorts, only to drop them almost immediately. The fragrant, figured parcels offered no solution. Obviously they contained nothing for a gentleman.