You'll give and give and give, and he'll take and take and take."
Hildegarde nodded. "I know what you mean. It isn't easy to help giving when he asks. Sometimes I think it must have been hard for mother. She had a free spirit."
"Some day," Crispin prophesied, "you'll leave him as she did."
"Oh, no," Hildegarde protested. "Don't say such things, Crispin."
The waffles arriving, with Sampson in devoted attendance, made further confidences impossible. And when breakfast was over, Hildegarde went back to her father, and Crispin, feeling like a castaway stranded on an island in a lonely sea, made his way to the deserted drawing-room, where the great tree stood, its lights out, its shine and radiance dulled. The shimmer of its gold and silver balls was deadened by the daylight. Its tinsel chains seemed tawdry; the little red Santa Claus on the topmost bough was tilted and had a slightly drunken look.
To Crispin the tree was symbolic. Last night in its shine and glow it had been the expression of the things that Christmas means. Two thousand years ago, wise men had brought gifts. So here was the tree—"These are your gifts," it had proclaimed, "for remembrance."
But who in all that throng had remembered? Upstairs they were all sleeping the morning away. They would drift down at noon, bored by the thought of the mid-day dinner. Night would come with a big supper