For themselves, Neil and Vestal put Biddy to bed early and spent Christmas Eve dancing at the Pineland.

“It’s a crime that you have to feed my whole hungry tribe tomorrow,” murmured Neil.

“Sweetie, anybody that you manage to get related to, even if it’s that second cousin of yours that runs the filling-station in Hiawatha, Wisconsin, is my pal, and always will be.”

“And I love you very much, and I’m praying that we’ll have fifty more happy Christmases together.”

“I drink to that!” cried Vestal, holding up her tiny glass of the white crème de menthe, frappé, which in Grand Republic is considered the most elegant cordial.

Drexel Greenshaw, the dark-brown, stately headwaiter of the Fiesole Room, with his small white mustache like that of a Haitian general trained in France, smiled to see his young people still so much in love. It elevated his feudal soul to hover near Captain Kingsblood, future president of the Second National, and his young wife, a real lady, daughter of the Prairie Power and Light.

Drexel thought to himself, “It’s just as I told that little fool, Belfreda: if she didn’t get along with a fine lady and gentleman like that, it was all her fault. My race will never have any trouble with high-class white people. I keep telling these colored agitators like Clem Brazenstar that they do more harm to my race than any mean buckra, and then they laugh at me and call me an ‘Uncle Tom’! Those radical scum don’t know nothing about aristocratic society. I’m tickled to death to serve a gentleman like Captain Kingsblood, that couldn’t never be nothing but a gentleman, nohow.”

Thus did the magisterial old Tory take his triumph all by himself, though he seemed to be considering nothing profounder than napkins. When Neil and Vestal rose, Drexel humbly shadowed them to the door, and chanted, “We always feel it’s a great honor to have you here in the Feesoly Room, Captain and Madam, and we hope we shall be privileged to serve you again soon.”

Drexel was almost hurt when Neil answered the tribute with a dollar, but he controlled himself.

* * * * *

Back home, Neil telephoned a Merry Christmas to his father and mother, at midnight, and they brought out the presents. Vestal had dug up wrinkled wrappings from pre-war Christmases, scarlet and silver and crocus-yellow, and ironed them out, and the odd-shaped boxes under the tree were a sparkling heap.

“It’s so pretty!” she exulted. “Oh, my dear lover, it’s been Christmas now for seventeen minutes, and you’re back from the war all safe, and everybody loves us, and we’re going to be happy forever.”

They clung together and trembled.

They were a handsome, confident and parental couple, in flannel dressing-gowns and purple scarves, when they came down before breakfast on Christmas morning, to help open the presents; and Biddy was a shining butterball in her tiny blue-and-white robe, Shirley a small dark Eskimo, and Prince a barking whirligig of excitement as they dragged the bright boxes out of the pile under the tree. Vestal was pleased by her own major gift, the fur-piece, because it was handsomer than Nancy Havock’s. They had waffles for breakfast, all of them—including Prince, and what a mistake that was—and Christmas carols on the radio, and they dressed and bustled into preparations for the family feast at two o’clock.