"Me-o-w," twinged a plaintive hint from the hallway just outside.
"Oh, but cats are different," argued Flame. "So soft, so plushy, so spineless! Cats were meant to be stuffed into things."
Without further parleying she doffed her red tam and sweater, donned a huge white all-enveloping pinafore, and started to ameliorate as best she could the Christmas sufferings of the "poor darlings" immediately at hand.
It was at least a yellow kitchen,—or had been once. In all that gray, dank, neglected house, the one suggestion of old sunshine.
"We shall have our dinner here," chuckled Flame. "After the carols—we shall have our dinner here."
Very boisterously in the yard just outside the window the four dogs scuffled and raced for sheer excitement and joy at this most unexpected advent of human companionship. Intermittently from time to time by the aid of old boxes or barrels they clawed their way up to the cobwebby window-sill to peer at the strange proceedings. Intermittently from time to time they fell back into the frozen yard in a chaos of fur and yelps.
By five o'clock certainly the faded yellow kitchen must have looked very strange, even to a dog!
Straight down its dingy, wobbly-floored center stretched a long table cheerfully spread with "the Rev. Mrs. Flamande Nourice's" second best table cloth. Quaint high-backed chairs dragged in from the shadowy parlor circled the table. A pleasant china plate gleamed like a hand-painted moon before each chair. At one end of the table loomed a big brown turkey; at the other, the appropriate vegetables. Pies, cakes, and doughnuts, interspersed themselves between. Green wreaths streaming with scarlet ribbons hung nonchalantly across every chair-top. Tinsel garlands shone on the walls. In the doorway reared a hastily constructed mimicry of a railroad crossing sign.
