"Now, my Angel-Imp, tell me all about it," began Elinor, when the lights were switched on in the sitting-room. "Or will you wait until we've taken off your hat and coat?"

But the child was not in the mood to wait for an earthquake. She began pouring forth her story, aided and supplemented, at first, by 36 Mademoiselle, who found it necessary to explain Claude. After alternately blaming and defending her absent-mindedness, however, the word passed from Rose to Angel, who was quick to seize the advantage. She alone knew the whole story, so she alone could tell how she had wanted to go home; how she hadn't liked to bother Mademoiselle; how she had got lost, and how, just then, she had found herself at the gate of the "fairy garden."

"I truly almost b'lieved it was," she announced, earnestly, "because you said, 'who knows if there aren't fairies?' So they must have gardens. Anyhow, the children are as pretty as fairies, but I don't think they can be as happy, because their mother cried, and their father's been wounded, and cheated, too, by a horrid man who's going to take everything away from them, even the garden, and the oranges—the last things they've got to eat. And they're dreadfully poor—oh, as poor as poor! That's what their mother was crying about when she left the children in the house so they wouldn't know. And when their father came home and found her 37 putting flowers to bed and crying on them, she cried more because he was carrying such a heavy Christmas tree and had hurt his foot getting it, and he was so pale and thin, she couldn't stop when he asked her. Besides, she'd had such bad news in a letter while he was gone! It was about the nasty man who took all their money and was going to take back the garden, too. That was why I was sure you'd want me to give them your di'mond ring that you hardly ever wear. It's always lying around somewhere, mother, so when I found it on my thumb—you see, I forgot to put it back on your table—I thought it would be just the thing, and a lovely surprise for the children when they found it tied to the cat's neck with my hair-ribbon. I 'spect they must be finding it now, because they brought me here—they and their mother, while their father was putting the dec'rations on the Christmas tree—and by this time maybe they're home. Their name's Valois—Suzanne and Paulette Valois, and their mother's Suzanne, too, or Susan, because she's English and 38 they're Belgian. And don't you think if grandpa sent me any presents I can give some to them? There's a whole pile of letters on the table. Maybe there's one from grandpa to say—"

"Stop—stop!" cried Elinor, catching the child before she could spring on the latest arrivals from the post. "It seems to me that you've been in rather too much of a hurry already, with your Christmas presents to the Valois family, though I know you meant for the best, darling. Now, the next thing to do is to explain how Father and Mother Valois happened to talk so much about their troubles before a stranger they'd never seen before——"

"Oh, they didn't see me then. I thought I telled you that!" broke in the child. "I eavesdropped, under a tree with branches most to the ground. I went in to play with the fluffiest white kitten, and it was while I was there they talked."

"How do you know they didn't see you?" inquired Elinor, judicially.

"Because if they had they wouldn't have talked, with me listening," 39 Angel carefully made clear to the slow comprehension of a grown-up.

"I'm not so sure," murmured the grownup. She did not speak the words aloud, because she wished her Angel-Imp to go on believing, as long as she might, that human nature was all good. It occurred to her that a tree must have abnormally thick branches, if a child in a pearl-gray velvet hood and coat trimmed with glistening chinchilla were to remain invisible throughout a long and intimate conversation. It occurred to her, also, that the velvet and chinchilla simply shouted "Money!" People were extraordinarily subtle, sometimes, when they had an object to gain, as she had learned in her girlhood through sad experience. She, too, had had faith in everybody when she was Angel's age, and even years older, but her father had thought it best that for self-protection she should be enlightened early. She did not quite believe in Angel's fairies of the fairy garden. The story, even as the child told it, had discrepancies. 40

"I fancy, darling," Elinor suggested, "that your new friends can't be so dreadfully poor as they made you think. You see, if they were, they'd have no money to spend on a Christmas tree—"

"It was growing on a mountain," Angel defended her friends.