It was just at the moment when Mary Christmas kissed the dimple between the second and third finger of John’s square little hand that Mary Wescott saw something which the others had quite overlooked. There were traces of tears on the brown face of their guest--quite unmistakable, tiny paths, which, dry as they now were, bore certain and tragic proof in their downward course across her smooth cheeks. And as Mary Wescott stared at those barely discernible lines, a singular thing happened to her. She who had seen tears and the traces of them in plenty during her twelve years began to feel suddenly as though she had never really seen them before in all her life. Those dry, white stains on the face of Mary Christmas were doing a strange thing to her, which she did not understand or like at all. They were shutting out all the people about her, her father, John, Roger, Cynthia, even Mary Christmas herself, the sunlight, the drifting petals of apple blossoms, and in their places were trying to show her Things which were not things at all. They were making her dimly aware that the sorrows in the world, the pitiful sufferings of the aged, the bewildering anguish of young people, the broken hearts of little children, are all a part of a great mantle of sorrow that encircles the whole wide earth in its dark, smothering folds. She drew back frightened; but just at that moment her mother, in blue gingham, appeared on the front steps. Now that blue gingham was a wonder-working fabric. It chased away the Things that Mary Wescott might have seen, and kept her a little girl for a whole year longer. The suddenness of it there on the porch brought back her father and the others, and, in spite of a peculiar clutching at her throat and the entirely absurd idea that she had been away somewhere, made her quite herself again. So when John, suddenly freeing himself from Cynthia’s grasp, ran boldly after Mary Christmas and his father and, to the astonishment of everyone, put his hand in the dark one of the stranger to lead her to his mother, she could follow with Roger and Cynthia, smiling at his unaccustomed friendliness and sharing their eager excitement in each new happening of this most extraordinary occasion. That dinner and the afternoon hours that followed were memorable ones in Wescott history. Mary Christmas sat at the table in the seat of honor at their father’s right, those disturbing marks of tears quite washed from her face, the red silk handkerchief tied neatly over her dark hair. Appetites languished among the Wescott children; and for once penalties were mercifully withheld from those who could eat no potato. Four pairs of eyes traveled from headdress to gold lacings, from brown cheeks, now flushed with color, to long brown fingers; four pairs of ears strained to detect among the broken, rhythmic fragments of her speech familiar everyday words that they could understand.