There were scraps of tinsel and odds and ends of ornaments
that had been broken or damaged by careless handling. These he hid away
in a chest in his room, as carefully as a miser would have hoarded a
bag of gold.
Clotilde Robard, the housekeeper, wondered why she found his candle
burned so low several mornings. She would have wondered still more if
she had gone into his room a while before daybreak. He had awakened
early, and, sitting up in bed with the quilts wrapped around him, spread
the scraps of tarletan on his knees. He was piecing together with his
awkward little fingers enough to make several tiny bags.
Henri missed his spade one morning, and hunted for it until he was out
of patience. It was nowhere to be seen. Half an hour later, coming back
to the house, he found it hanging in its usual place, where he had
looked for it a dozen times at least. Jules had taken it down to the
woods to dig up a little cedar-tree, so little that it was not over a
foot high when it was planted in a box.
Clotilde had to be taken into the secret, for he could not hide it from
her. "It is for my Uncle Martin," he said, timidly. "Do you think he
will like it?"
The motherly housekeeper looked at the poor little tree, decked out in
its scraps of cast-off finery, and felt a sob rising in her throat, but
she held up her hands with many admiring exclamations that made Jules
glow with pride.
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