t looked at her sister
hopefully.

Gwen stared at the ground and went very red, but she said nothing, and
Beatrice, after waiting a moment, turned away and entered the post
office.

"Of all absolute frauds, I feel the meanest!" groaned Gwen. "Beatrice
will think me a perfect miser, hoarding up my money and not willing to
spend a farthing on anybody! If she only knew the bankruptcy of my
box! Was any wretched girl ever in such a fix? Oh! Gwen Gascoyne,
you've got yourself into an atrocious mess altogether, and I don't see
how you're ever going to climb out of it."

Gwen's one sheet anchor of hope, to which she clung in a kind of
desperation, was the thought of the postal orders that Grannie and
Aunt Violet almost invariably sent at Christmas. If these did not
arrive, she could not pay Netta, and then--well, any kind of
catastrophe might be expected to follow. She went about with a load of
lead on her heart, and a consequent shortness of temper highly trying
to the rest of the family. She was grumpy with the little boys,
impatient with Lesbia, and so unaccommodating over doing the
decorations in church that Beatrice finally begged her to go home,
saying she and Winnie could finish alone.

"You two always want to get rid of me!" flared out Gwen as she stumped
defiantly away.

It was not a very happy preparation for Christmas, and Gwen stood
rather forlornly in the church porch, her hands in her pockets,
watching a few snowflakes that were beginning to fall silently from
the heavy grey sky and to whiten the tops of the gravestones and the
outlines of the crooked yew trees near the gate. The peace and
goodwill that ought to have been present everywhere to-day seemed to
have vanished.

"Beatrice was just horrid," thought Gwen, quite oblivious of the fact
that the quarrel was of her own making. We are so apt to forget that
the world is like a mirror, and if we insist upon frowning into it, it
will probably frown back. We sometimes expect other people to do all
the forbearing, and then are astonished if our much-tried friends fail
in the very point in which we ourselves are so deficient.

"Why, Gwen, what a woebegone face!" exclaimed Father, who hurried in
for a moment to speak to the parish clerk. "You'd make a grand model
for an artist who wanted to paint a picture of 'Misery'. Are the
decorations finished?"

"Almost; at least my part of them."

"Then go home and open that parcel of Parish Magazines you'll find o