eets.

He left the note at Whiting's door. He fancied that, as the footman held
it open, he saw Marion shining on the stairs!

He was glad after that to get home and to bed, and to the warmth of his
blanket. There was the warmth, too, of the wine.

In a little while he was asleep. On the table by his untidy bed was the
box of biscuits and the bottle and the tin of tiny sausages.

If all went well he would feast like a lord on Christmas morning!

RETURNED GOODS

Perhaps the most humiliating moment of Dulcie Cowan's childhood had been
when Mary Dean had called her Indian giver. Dulcie was a child of
affluence. She had always had everything she wanted; but she had not
been spoiled. She had been brought up beautifully and she had been
taught to consider the rights of others. She lived in an old-fashioned
part of an old city, and her family was churchly and conscientious.
Indeed, so well-trained was Dulcie's conscience that it often caused her
great unhappiness. It seemed to her that her life was made up largely of
denying herself the things she wanted. She was tied so rigidly to the
golden rule that her own rights were being constantly submerged in the
consideration of the rights of others.

So it had happened that when she gave to Mary Dean a certain lovely
doll, because her mother had suggested that Dulcie had so many and Mary
so few, Dulcie had spent a night of agonized loneliness. Then she had
gone to Mary.

"I want my Peggy back."

"You gave her to me."

"But I didn't know how much I loved her, Mary. I'll buy you a nice new
doll, but I want my Peggy back."

It was then that Mary had called her Indian giver. Mary had been a
sturdy little thing with tight-braided brown hair. She had worn on that
historic occasion a plain blue gingham with a white collar. To the
ordinary eye she seemed just an every-day freckled sort of child, but to
Dulcie she had been a little dancing devil, as she had stuck out her
forefinger and jeered "Indian giver!"

Dulcie had held to her point and had carried her Peggy off in triumph.
Mary, with characteristic independence, had refused to accept the
beautiful doll which Dulcie bought with the last cent of her allowance
and brought as a peace offering. In later years they grew to be rather
good friends. They might, indeed, have been intimate, if it had not been
for Dulcie's money and Mary's dislike of anything which savored of
patronage.

It was Mary's almost boyish indepen