Joyce understood, now, why the room where the Christmas tree stood had been kept so carefully locked.

For two days that room had been empty and the tree had been standing in Monsieur Ciseaux's parlor.
Cousin Kate and madame and Berthe and Marie and Gabriel had all been over there, busily at work, and neither she nor Jules had suspected what was going on down-stairs.
Now she marched with the others, out of the garden and across the road, keeping time to the music of the wheezy old accordion that Gabriel played so proudly.

Surely every soul, in all that long procession filing through the gate of the giant scissors, belonged to the kingdom of loving hearts and gentle hands; for they were all children who passed through, or else mothers who carried in their arms the little ones who, but for these faithful arms, must have missed this Noel fete.
Jules had been carried down-stairs and laid on a couch in the corner of the room where he could see the tree to its best advantage.

Beside him sat his great-aunt, Desire, dressed in a satin gown of silvery gray that had been her mother's, and looking as if she had just stepped out from the frame of the portrait up-stairs.

She held Jules's hand in hers, as if with it she grasped the other Jules, the little brother of the olden days for whom this child had been named.