Noel's Christmas Tree
9781465683359
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Dinah, do hurry up! A small boy with close cropped brown head and dark eager eyes was drumming with his fingers on the windowpane. He turned his head over his shoulder as he spoke, and his tone was impatient. Dinah, or Diana as she was really called, lay flat on her chest by the schoolroom fire. Big sheets of paper were before her, and with a good deal of sucking of her pencil she was writing rapidly. She was very thin and pale; her nurse said she was wiry, and her fair hair was bobbed in the usual fashion. "How do you spell alarming, two l's and two m's?" she asked, without raising her head. "Hurray! Here's the taxi! Such a lot of luggage! You're too late; you can't see it now." Diana had dashed to the window. They were at the top of a high London house, in one of the quiet roads of South Kensington, but try as they could, they could neither see the cab nor its occupants now, and the windows were too heavy to be raised. "Aha!" shouted the boy, dancing round the room. "I saw, and you didn't!" "What did you see?" "A monkey, and a parrot, and a black, and a huge bunch of coco nuts!" "I don't believe you. Did you see—Mother?" She added the last word in an awed whisper. He looked at her, then impishly shook his head. "I dare say she hasn't come. P'r'aps she's drowned in the sea." "You wicked, wicked boy!" "You're always making those kind of things in your stories." Diana stole out of the room on tiptoe. Her brother Chris followed her. Hanging breathlessly over the staircase, they vainly tried to see what was going on in the hall. How could Granny have ordered them to stay up in the schoolroom till sent for, when an unknown mother and brother were arriving from India! It was too tantalizing! They could hear a great bustle in the hall, and then a little shrill voice made itself heard: "I've gotted new boots with buttons." "That's him," said Diana. Chris danced up and down in excitement. "We must see them," he cried. "Then Granny or Nurse will only send us to bed. Of course Nurse is down there. I hear her voice. Mean old thing! As if we oughtn't to see Mother before she does!" But the next moment Nurse came panting upstairs.
