Part 3

He hurried her past the threshold of Mr. Stephen Kingsley's room. Across the baby's golden head Uncle Stephen looked tensely up at them. It needed but one look. Then his nephew sprang forward and took Anne's baby sister from a grasp which had grown suddenly nerveless, and his niece, stooping over her uncle's chair, gently patted a white cheek down which the first tear of relief was slowly trickling.

It seems to "work that way" with the whole human race. Except, perhaps, with mothers. Upstairs, Mrs. Sam sat beside her boy's bed, and his keen young eyes saw no tears upon her lovely, radiant face. If she cried at all it was only in her heart--her happy heart--which ached yet with the agony of what might have been--on Christmas Day.

It was a good thing that the dining-room in the old house was a big one. Mr. Kingsley had specially decreed that everybody--everybody--should be seated at one great table. There was to be no compromise effected by having the children wait for the "second table"--has any one who has ever waited for that "second table" at a family gathering forgotten what an ordeal it is, or how interminably long the old folks are about it? There were twenty-nine of them, including the three babies, but by some marvel of arrangement Mrs. Griggs had managed to make a place for every one.

"But you'll have to say how we're to seat them," said Mrs. Griggs, anxiously invading Mr. Stephen Kingsley's room. "With all our planning we've forgot that part. You'd better make me out a list, so I can lay those holly cards you've written the names on."

"Bless my soul," murmured Mr. Kingsley, "must they be specially arranged? Of course they must. I had forgotten. Clara"--he turned to his sister who came in at the moment--"help me with this, will you?"

"Give me the cards, Mrs. Griggs," requested Mrs. Clara capably. She swept a clear space on the table at her brother's elbow as she spoke.

"What's all this?" asked Jim Dent at the door five minutes later. "Card games?"

"Do come and help me, Jim," cried his aunt. "I thought this would be easy, but it's not. I can't keep George's and William's families apart," she explained in a lower tone. "There are so many of them."

"Don't try."

"Oh, but I must. They--you know that old----"

"It seems to be a thing of the past. I met Uncle George's boy Harold and Uncle William coming downstairs hand in hand just now. They'd been up to see Syl together."

"Jim!" His uncle's face lighted as if the sunlight had struck it. "But the fathers?"

Jim put his head out of the door and took a survey of the room beyond. "Sitting on opposite sides of the fireplace," he announced.

"That's pretty near," admitted Mr. Kingsley. "That's certainly pretty near. With a fire between them. I wonder what----"

"Syl's tumble did it. It made the mix-up we were looking for. Not exactly as we would have planned it, but rather more effectively, I should say."

"Stephen," said Mrs. Clara, moving the cards about in an absent sort of way, "Stephen and Jim, I want to tell you that--well--Isabel and I----"

"Yes," helped Stephen eagerly.

"Good for you!" encouraged her nephew.

"We couldn't seem to keep it up--not here--on Christmas Day--after Syl----" Tears were suddenly threatening the holly cards. Mrs. Clara rose quickly. "I think they're all right now, Stephen," she said, indicating the cards and clearing her eyes with a touch of a lace-bordered handkerchief. "I've put Sam and Syl at the far ends of the table."

"I want them near together."

"But--had you better?"

"I'm going to risk it."

"Risk it, Uncle Steve," advised Jim. "Everybody's taking chances to-day."

"But--Sam and Sylvester!" persisted Clara doubtfully.

"It's Christmas Day with them, too," argued Jim.

Mrs. Clara went out with the cards and laid them down at the proper places. She had arranged them as nearly as possible in approved dinner style, a man next a woman, then a boy, then a girl, then another man, another woman, and so on.

When she had gone Jim sneaked out and scrutinized this arrangement. Laughing to himself he picked up the cards and juggled with them. About his uncle Stephen he grouped the cards of his three brothers and their wives. At the other end of the table he put all the children together.

"There, that's better," said Jim with conviction, to himself.

Mrs. Griggs announced dinner. Jim Dent brought Uncle Stephen out first in his wheel-chair and placed him at the head of the table. Then came the rest, Samuel Kingsley carrying his son Syl, looking very hero-like indeed, with his bandaged head and his arm in a sling. All the children's eyes were riveted fascinatedly on Syl as he was placed in a special easy chair at the foot of the table, where nobody could possibly by any chance hit the injured arm.

On one side of Mr. Stephen Kingsley, Mrs. Samuel found her place; on the other side, Mrs. Sylvester. Sylvester was next Mrs. Sam, Sam beyond Mrs. Syl. How he dared, every one wondered, thinking it Uncle Stephen's plan. Uncle Stephen himself turned a little pale as he saw them standing behind their chairs. Only Jim Dent, whose wide-awake eyes had been seeing things all day, felt at all cool about it. And even he was not quite as cool as he looked.

There was a moment's hushed silence before they sat down, even the children fluttering into quiet. Then, just as everybody laid hands on chairback, Samuel Kingsley spoke.

"Steve," he said, looking at his brother, "I want to make a little speech."

Everybody was at attention. Stephen Kingsley looked up, wondering. He smiled at his brother, but his heart was making riot in his feeble breast. What was Sam going to do?

"I want to say," said Samuel--then he stopped. He was an accomplished after-dinner speaker, was Samuel Kingsley, but he had never had a speech to make like this one. He had thought he had it ready on his tongue, but it stuck in his throat. He turned and looked down the table at his boy Syl. Syl nodded at him, comprehending in a boyish way that his father was having some sort of difficulty with his speaking apparatus. Then Samuel looked at Mrs. Samuel, who smiled at him. She was a little pale yet, but her smile was bright as ever. Yet still Samuel could not make his speech.

The silence grew tense. Jim Dent, leaning forward and watching his uncle eagerly, felt that it must be relieved. He lifted his glass. "Here's to Uncle Sam's speech!" he cried.

The tension broke. Everybody laughed--a little agitatedly, and Uncle Sam's firm lips, under the close-cut, gray moustache, wavered, then set themselves. He looked at his nephew, and something about the sympathetic affection in the bright blue eyes steadied him.

"I'm afraid I can't make it, after all, Jim," said Samuel. "But perhaps I can act it."

And he stretched his hand across the table toward his brother Sylvester, who grasped it, as everybody could see, with a grip that stung.

Jim Dent's eyes flew to his Uncle Stephen's face. He saw it like that of Saint Stephen's of old, "_as it had been the face of an angel._"

To young Sylvester Kingsley, hero of the day, was destined to come still further distinction. It was all of a chance observation of his, made just before his removal to bed--at the same hour as his baby sister, much to his disgust. But, resigning himself to his fate, as Cousin Jim stooped to bear him away he gave one last look about the pleasant, holly-hung room.

Although their elders had kept as many of the family differences from their children's ears as was possible, they had not been able to forestall the use of the children's sharp eyes, and the sight Syl now saw struck him as unusual. It was nothing more than the gathering of five brothers, of varying ages, about the chair of one of their number, in front of the great fireplace where roared and crackled a mighty fire of logs. But the expressions of geniality and cordial interest upon the five faces indicated such good fellowship that the young son of Samuel Kingsley was moved to say to his cousin Jim:

"What a lot of brothers there are in this house! Dad's got four, and I've three and Harold's two, and they're all in this room. This ought to be called 'Brotherly House.'"

"So it ought," agreed Jim Dent, smiling at the thought. "It would be a fine name, and true, too."

He carried the boy away, and stopped to tell him a story after he was in bed--a football story, such as only Cousin Jim could tell, because he knew all about it from the inside. But when Jim came back to the fireside he told them of young Syl's idea. "And a jolly idea I call it, don't you?" he added.

Uncle Stephen looked from one to another of the four men around him, and saw the assenting smiles upon their faces--a bit shame-faced, perhaps, yet genuine.

Samuel Kingsley rose to his feet. "I could make my speech now," he said, with a happy laugh, his hands shoved well down into his pockets, where they jingled some loose change there in a boyish fashion. "But I don't want to. I'm only going to say that as long as I have a brother in the world like Stephen Kingsley I'm coming to see him as often as he'll have me. And the more of you boys I meet here the better I'll be pleased--particularly if the boy I meet here happens to be--" he glanced, smiling, across the little circle--"my brother Syl!"

"Hear, hear!" answered Sylvester Kingsley's deep voice.

So, to Stephen Kingsley's intense delight, "_Brotherly House_" it was--and has been ever since.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N.Y.