When the others had been left at their several homes, Tommy helped Erica drag her tree into the house and set it up in the usual place between the hearth and the north window. Then, without waiting to trim it, the cousins went across the garden, dragging the last tree between them. A sound of voices in the sitting room made them stop in the hall of the other house and peep in at the open door. Aunt Callie was seated in her big rocker by the hearth, with Aunt Charity opposite her, and between them, in chairs drawn comfortably up to the red glow of the coals, sat a fair, ruddy-cheeked young man with an unmistakably seafaring air about him, and a slender girl about Erica’s own age, dressed in black. The girl’s face was pale in the firelight, and so thin the features looked oddly pinched and sharp. Her forehead was puckered in three fine, vertical lines that gave her a fretful, unhappy expression. At Mrs. Folger’s feet—where the two at the door had not seen her in this first glance—a pretty little girl of three or four sat on a low hassock, one plump, rosy cheek pressed confidingly against Aunt Callie’s knee. The child’s hair, which clustered in tight, bronze-colored curls over her charming little head, reflected the firelight in warm splashes of reddish gold with each move she made, and now, at some sound from the hall, she turned a blue-eyed, baby smile that way. Mrs. Folger called: “Tommy! Erica! Is that you, dears?” They came in then, dragging the bushy pine tree, and the curly-haired baby uttered a little shriek of delight at sight of it. “Clistmus t’ee!” she shouted, gleefully. “Barbee’s Clistmus t’ee. All for Barbee!” Mrs. Folger addressed the young man with the seafaring look about him, who had risen politely at Erica’s entrance. “Bernard, this is my niece, Erica Folger—you remember Captain Eric, of course. And my son Tom. Children, this is a cousin of mine, Mr. Bernard Gatchel, whom I have not laid eyes on since my marriage. He came to Nantucket today on Captain Joy’s sloop, on a sad errand.” She hesitated, and laid a gentle hand on the thin, fretful girl’s dark hair. “These are his sister’s children—Mildred and Barbara Thorne. Their mother and I went to school together in Boston.” Mrs. Folger had not been a Nantucket girl. “Besides being second cousins, we were very close friends and loved one another dearly. Tommy has certainly heard me talk of Cousin Jane Thorne.” The boy nodded bewilderedly, and then smiled in answer to a flash of small white teeth between Barbee’s parted lips. “Cousin Jane died a month ago,” Mrs. Folger said. “So this is not a happy Christmas for my poor Milly.” Again that motherly touch on the dark hair; but there was no lighting or softening of the fretful face below it, and Erica, looking on, was conscious of a resentful sense of vicarious rebuff.