THE RED CANDLE
"Milly said to tell you that we had a fire."
"A real fire, Pussy? I didn't know that there was one in the world."
He came down again to the first floor. Pussy was waiting—a freckled dot of a child tied up in a man's coat.
The fire was in a small round stove. On top of the stove something was boiling. The room was neat but bare, the stove, a table, and three chairs its only furnishing. In a room beyond were two beds covered with patchwork quilts.
On the table was a tree. It was a Christmas tree—just a branch of pine and some cheap spangly things. The mother of the children sewed all day and late into the night. She had worked a little longer each night for a month that the children might have the tree.
There was no light in the room but that of a small and smoky lamp.
Milly spoke of it. "We ought to have candles."
Ostrander, shrugged close to the stove, with his hands out to its heat, knew that they ought to have electric lights, colored ones, a hundred perhaps, and a tree that touched the stars!
But he said: "When I go out I'll bring you a red candle—a long one—and we'll put it on the shelf over the table."
Milly, who was resting her tired young body in a
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