It was the twilight of Christmas evening,—that twilight which always seems so early, since nobody is ever quite ready for it. The pale gray of the winter’s sky was scarcely flushed by the low-lying sunset clouds, though sometimes you could catch a gleam of their scant brightness as you turned westward.

The streets of New York were crowded, as usual, but everybody seemed even more than usually in a hurry. The air was intensely cold, and nipped the noses of those who were late with their Christmas shopping; but, in spite of it, men and women still jostled each other upon the sidewalk, or stopped to look at the tempting displays of holiday goods in the shops. Everybody, it seemed, had some small person at home who must be made happy to-morrow.

From the window of a large but rusty-looking house on one of the avenues, two children looked down at the throng below, as they had been looking all day. They were in the fourth story of the house, and they could not see into the street very distinctly, but still the movement and the bustle interested them, and their mother was thankful that they had it to watch.

She herself was sewing, catching the last glint of the sunset light for her work, as she had the first ray of the dawning. She had been a beautiful, high-bred woman; indeed, she was so still, though there was no one to note the unconscious elegance of her gestures or the graceful lines of her curving figure and bent head. She was very thin now, and very poorly clad, but a stranger would have felt that she was a lady, and wondered how she came in the fourth story of this house,—a great house, which had been handsome, too, in its day, but which was now let out to innumerable lodgers, mostly of the decent sort of honest, hard-working, half-starved poor people. Not with such neighbors had Mrs. Vanderheyden’s lot been formerly cast, nor for such uses as this had the old house itself been designed. It had been a stately mansion in its time, belonging to the estate of a good old Knickerbocker family, which was quite run out now. But there was one great comfort in this house: it had been so well built that its thick walls shut out all alien noises effectually, and made solitude possible even in a tenement house. Perhaps Mrs. Vanderheyden had thought of this when she chose her abode there.

There was something in the faded grandeur of the old mansion that harmonized with the lingering grace of her own faded beauty. Its lofty walls were wainscoted with carved oak, almost black with time; and any imaginative person would have been likely to people it with the ghosts of the beautiful girls whose room no doubt this was in the old days. There, between those windows, hung, perhaps, their great, gleaming mirror, and into it they looked, all smiles and blushes and beauty, when they were ready for their first ball. But Mrs. Vanderheyden’s two little girls did not think of the other girls who might have lived there once. They were too young for that, and too hungry. Ethel, the elder, was only ten; and shy little Annie, beside her, scarcely seven. They saw a sight, however, from the window at which they stood, that interested them more than any vision of the past would have done.

The avenue on which they lived was in a transition state. Trade had come into it and lodging-houses had vulgarized it, and yet there were some of the rich old residents who still clung to the houses in which their fathers and mothers had lived and died. There was one such directly opposite; and to look into the parlor over the way, and see there all the warmth and brightness and beauty of which they themselves were deprived, had been one of the chief enjoyments of the little Vanderheydens ever since they had been in the house. They were all that Mrs. Vanderheyden had left, these two girls. Wealth was gone, friends were gone, father and father’s home, husband and husband’s home—hope itself was gone; but she was not quite alone while she had these two for whom to struggle—to live or to die, as Heaven would. It was for their sakes that she had worked from dawning till nightfall, though she had felt all the time what seemed to her a mortal sickness stealing over her. Their breakfast and dinner had been only bread, of which she herself had scarcely tasted; but to-morrow would be Christmas, and it should go hard with her but she would give them better fare then. A dozen times during the day one or the other little voice had asked anxiously,—

“Shall we surely, surely, have dinner to-morrow, because it is Christmas Day?”

And she had answered,—

“Please Heaven, you surely shall. My work is almost done;” and then she had stitched away more resolutely than ever on the child’s frock she was elaborately embroidering. The children meanwhile were feeding upon hope, and watching a scene in the house over the way, where, as they thought, all that any human creature could possibly hope for had already been given. Busy preparations had been made in that other house for Christmas. There was a great Christmas-tree in one corner, all full of little tapers, and a large, fair, gentle-looking woman had been engaged much of the afternoon in arranging gifts upon it. Now, with the twilight, a boy and girl had come in and were watching the lighting up of the Christmas-tree.

“It’s so good of them not to pull the curtains down,” Ethel said, with a sigh of delight. “It’s almost as good as being there—almost.”

“I do suppose that’s the very grandest house in all New York,” little Annie said, in a tone of awe and admiration.

“Nonsense! You only think that because you are so little,” answered Ethel, from the height of her three years more of experience. “You forget, but I can remember. We had a finer house ourselves, before poor papa died. There are plenty of them, only we’re so poor we don’t see them.”

“Oh, it’s good to be that little girl!” cried Annie. “See how pretty her dress is, and how her hair curls; and she’ll have lots of presents off that Christmas-tree.”

“So should we, if we had papa,” Ethel answered gravely. “Mamma, when we get up to heaven, do you think papa will know we’re his little girls?”

“I’m sure he will,” Mrs. Vanderheyden answered; and then she rose wearily. “It’s all done,” she said, as she shook out the lovely little robe into which she had wrought so many patient stitches. “I cannot carry it home just yet, I am so tired; I must lie down first; but you shall have a good dinner to-morrow, my darlings.”

The children had seen her very tired before, and they didn’t think much about it when she groped her way to a bed in the corner and lay down, drawing the scant bed-clothes up over her. They stood at the window still, and watched the merry children opposite, until at last a servant came and pulled down the curtains and shut away from them the Christmas-tree, with all its gleaming lights, and the boy and girl, who were dancing round it to some gay tune which their mother played.

Then Ethel and Annie began to realize that they were cold and hungry and the room was dark. Ethel lit a candle. The fire was nearly out, but she would not make another till morning.

“I won’t wake up mamma,” she said, with the premature thoughtfulness that characterized her; “she’s so tired. We’ll just have supper, and then I’ll hear you say ‘Our Father,’ and we’ll get to bed, and in the morning it will be Christmas.”

Some vague promise of good was in the very word: Ethel did not know what would come, but surely Christmas would not be like other days. “Supper” was the rest of the bread. And then the two little creatures knelt down together and said their well-known prayers, and I think “Our Father” heard, for their sleep was just as sweet as if they had been in the warm, soft nest of the children over the way, tucked in with eider down. Through the long evening hours they slept,—through the solemn midnight, when the clear, cold Christmas stars looked down, just as they had looked centuries ago when the King of Glory, Himself a little child, lay asleep in an humble manger in Judea. Nothing troubled their quiet slumber until the sunshine of the Christmas morning broke through their dingy windows, and the day had begun.

“It must be ever so late,” said Ethel, rubbing her sleepy eyes, “and mamma isn’t awake yet. But she was so tired. You lie still, Annie, and I’ll build the fire, and when she wakes up she’ll find it all done.”

Very patiently the poor little half-frozen fingers struggled with the scant kindlings and the coal that seemed determined never to light; but they succeeded at last, and the room began to grow a little warm. Then she dressed Annie, and then it began to seem very late indeed, and she wondered if mamma would never wake up. She went to the bedside and, bending over, kissed her mother gently, then started back with a sudden alarm.

“Why, Annie, she’s so cold—almost like poor papa—only you can’t remember—just before they took him away.”

“No, she can’t be like papa,” Annie said stoutly, “for he was dead, and mamma is asleep.”

“Yes, she’s asleep,” said the elder sister firmly. “We must wait till she wakes up. We’ll look over the way, and then, maybe, it won’t seem so long.”

But over the way was brighter than ever this Christmas morning. The curtains had been looped back once more, the table glittered with lovely gifts, and presently the little girl who lived there came to the windows. She looked up at them—they were sure of it; but they could not have guessed what she said, as she turned away, and spoke to her mother.

“O mamma,” cried the sweet young voice, “won’t you come and see these two poor little girls? They stood there all day yesterday and last night; and now see how sad they look. I can’t eat my Christmas candies or play with my Christmas things while they look so pale and lonesome. Won’t you go over and see them, mamma dear?”

Mrs. Rosenburgh was a woman of warm and earnest sympathies when once they were aroused. When she was a girl she too had had quick impulses like her child’s; but she had grown selfish, perhaps, as she grew older, or maybe only careless; for the quick sympathies were there still, as you could see, now that her little girl had touched them.

“To be sure I will,” she answered at once. “Poor little things! I wish we could make merry Christmas for all New York; but since we can’t, at least we won’t have faces white with want looking in at our very windows.”

So the watching, wondering children saw the large, fair lady wrap herself in a heavy shawl and tie a hood over her head, and then come out and cross the street and enter their house.

“What if she saw us, and what if she is coming here!” Ethel said breathlessly.

Then they listened as if their hearts were in their ears. They heard feet upon the stairs and then a gentle tap, and the lady from over the way stood in their room.

“I saw you at the window,” she said, “and came over to wish you a merry Christmas. How is this? Are you all alone?”

“No, ma’am, mamma is in the bed there; but she was very tired yesterday, and she hasn’t waked up.”

An awful terror seized Mrs. Rosenburgh. Had this woman died of want and weariness, in sight of her own windows? She stepped to the bedside, and drew away the clothes gently from the face of the sleeper. She looked a moment on that fair, faded face, and then she grew white as death.

“Children,” she asked, “what are your names?”

“I am Ethel Vanderheyden,” the oldest girl answered, “and she is Annie.”

“And your mother—was she Ethel Carlisle once?”

“Yes, ma’am, before she married papa.”

“And your little sister is Annie?”

“Yes; she was named for mamma’s best friend, one she hadn’t seen for a long, long time.”

Meanwhile Mrs. Rosenburgh had knelt by the bedside. She had lifted the low-lying head upon her arm, and drawn a bottle of pungent salts from her pocket, and she was crying as if her heart would break, while the children looked wondering on.

“O Ethel, my own old Ethel, wake up!” And then she dropped her cheek, all wet with tears, against the white, cold cheek, that was so still.

Oh, was it the warm tears, or the voice that sounded from far away out of the past, or only the strong odor that roused the poor soul from that long, heavy sleep of exhaustion that had so nearly been the sleep of death? I do not know, but I know the eyes did open, and beheld the tender face bending above them. And then, like a little child, the children heard their mother cry,—

“O Annie, Annie, have I been dreaming all this time?”

And then there were explanations, and the story of the long years since Annie Bryant and Ethel Carlisle were girls together was told. But the best of it all, the children thought, was when the lady from over the way took them home with her, and told them the boy and girl there should be their brother and sister, and they should live there henceforth; for she, who had found again her best friend, would never more let her struggle with want alone.

And so the children had gifts and dinner, and a merry, merry Christmas in the bright, warm, crimson-hung room, which had seemed to them such a paradise of delights when they looked down into it from their fourth-story window through the falling shadows of Christmas Eve.