He had made out the checks he usually sent to
certain institutions and certain parties at this season of the year
for his head clerk to mail. By this time they had been received, but
with them had gone no word of greeting or good will; his card alone
had been inclosed. A few orders had been left at various stores, but
with them went no Christmas spirit. He wondered how it would feel to
buy a thing that could make one's face look as Carmencita's had looked
when she made her purchase of the night before. It was a locket she
had bought--a gold locket.
In a whispered confidence while in the car she had told him it was for
her mother's picture. The picture used to be in her father's watch,
but the watch had to be sold when he was sick, after her mother's
death, and he had missed the touch of the picture so. She knew, for
often she had seen him holding his watch in his hand, open at the
back, where the picture lay, with his fingers on it, and sometimes he
would kiss it when he thought she was out of the room. After the watch
was sold the picture had been folded up in one of her mother's
handkerchiefs, and her father kept it in the pocket of his coat; but
once it had slipped out of the handkerchief, and once through a hole
in the pocket, and they thought it was lost.
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