ou we have to thank for our dinner!" she exclaimed.

"You don't have us to _thank_," put in Mrs. McGregor quickly.

"But you surely wouldn't have me be taking a dinner like that and not
thanking you for it," said Julie. "And neither O'Dowd nor I had an
inkling! Think of our coming up here Christmas morning and all of you
keeping so mum!"

"We'd have kept mum longer, if it hadn't been for Nell and Martin,"
Carl asserted. "I don't see why they couldn't shut up, Ma."

"A secret's no easy treasure to have in one's possession," Mrs. O'Dowd
put in quickly. "And you must remember they are but mites--Nell and
Martin. Indeed, in my opinion, it's a miracle they didn't blurt it out
long before this. You wouldn't get a child of mine to hold his peace
any such while; neither the big ones nor the little could do it. Well,
well! It was a happy day you gave us and you certainly deserved the
dinner you got yourselves. And you had no notion when you sent ours you
were to have one of your own."

"No! When it came we thought for a moment you had sent our present
back," Carl explained.

"In other words, you were going without your dinner to give it to us,"
commented Julie.

"We had our tree," Mary interrupted. "We didn't need both things."

"It's few would have done what you did," Julie remarked quietly.
"O'Dowd and I will not be forgetting it, either."

Tears came into the eyes of the little woman and as if words failed her
she wheeled about and disappeared down the dim hallway.

"At least, she was not put out by our doing it," commented Mrs.
McGregor, after her neighbor had gone. "I feared some she might be. But
evidently she accepted the gift just as we meant it. So that's settled!
Now if we could only find out where our own dinner came from and say as
much to its giver, I'd be entirely content. I've taxed my brain until
my head is fair aching and still I'm no nearer having an idea where
that basket of ours came from than the man in the moon."

"I guess you will just have to rate it as coming from the fairies,"
smiled her brother, "and let the matter rest there; that is, unless Hal
Harling gets another inspiration."

"Another inspiration! Sure the inspiration he had wasn't worth much,"
sniffed Mrs. McGregor. "Unless he can provide a better one than that I
sha'n't be listening to him."

"You may as well not be slandering him, for here he is now," Carl
cried, jumping up to admit his chum whose footfall he had heard on the
s