THE GAY COCKADE
big rocker with the baby in her arms, asked: "Can we put it in a bottle or stand it in a cup? We haven't any candlestick."
"We can do better than that," he told her, "with a saucer turned upside down and covered with salt to look like snow."
Pussy, economically anxious, asked, "Can we eat the salt afterward?"
"Of course."
"Then, may we do it, Milly?"
"Darling, yes. How nice you always fix things, Mr. Tony!"
Long before he had known them he had fixed things—things which would have turned this poor room into an Aladdin's palace. There was that Christmas Eve at the Daltons'. It had been his idea to light the great hall with a thousand candles when they brought in the Yule log, and to throw perfumed fagots on the fire.
He came back to the round stove and the tiny tree. "I like to fix things," he said. "Once upon a time"
They leaned forward eagerly to this opening.
"Of course you know it isn't true," he prefaced.
"Of course it couldn't be true"—Pussy was reassuringly sceptical—"the things that you tell us couldn't really happen—ever"
"Well, once upon a time, there was a tree in a
134
