She already owned so many books, and trinkets, that she hardly knew what else to wish for unless it might be a coral fan chain and a mother-of-pearl manicure set.

But deep down in the heart of the ball she would like to find a wishing-nut, that would grant her wishes like an Aladdin's lamp whenever it was rubbed.
She must have fallen asleep in the midst of her day-dreaming, for it seemed to her that it was only a minute after she closed her book, that she heard the half-past five o'clock train whistling at the station, and while she was still rubbing her eyes she saw her father coming up the avenue.
All day she had had a lingering hope that he might bring her something when he came out from the city.

"If it's nothing but a bag of peanuts," she thought, "it will be better than having a birthday go by without anything, 'specially when all the othahs have been neahly as nice as Christmas." She peeped out between the curtains, scanning him eagerly as he came toward the house, but there was no package in either hand, and no suggestive parcel bulged from any of his pockets.
"I'll not be a baby," Lloyd whispered to herself, winking her eyelids rapidly to clear away a sort of mist that seemed to blur the landscape.
"I'm too old to care so much." Still, it was such a disappointment, added to all the others that the day had brought, that she buried her face in the cushions and cried softly.
She could hear her father's voice in the next room, presently.

It seemed quite loud and cheerful; more cheerful than it had sounded since her mother's dreadful neuralgic headaches had begun.

A few minutes later she heard her mother laugh.