With a little hand that trembled perfectly palpably Flame reached back to the arm of the big carved chair for support.
"Why—why, but Mr. Delcote is an old man," she gasped. "I'm almost sure he's an old man."
The smile on Delcote's mouth spread suddenly to his eyes.
"Not yet,—Thank God!" he bowed.
With a panic-stricken glance at doors, windows, cracks, the chimney pipe itself, Flame sank limply down in her seat again and gestured towards the empty place opposite her.
"Have a—have a chair," she stammered. Great tears welled suddenly to her eyes. "Oh, I—I know I oughtn't to be here," she struggled. "It's perfectly ... awful! I haven't the slightest right! Not the slightest! It's the—the cheekiest thing that any girl in the world ever did!... But your Butler said...! And he did so want to go away and—And I did so love your dogs! And I did so want to make one Christmas in the world just—exactly the way I wanted it! And—and—Mother and Father will be crazy!... And—and—"
Without a single glance at anything except herself, the Master of the House slipped back into his chair.
"Have a heart!" he said.
Flame did not accept this suggestion. With a very severe frown and downcast eyes she sat staring at the table. It seemed a very cheerless table suddenly, with all the dogs in various stages of disheveled finery grouped blatantly around their Master's chair.
"I can at least have my cat," she thought, "my—faithful cat!" In another instant she had slipped from the table, extracted poor Puss from a clutter of pans in the back of a cupboard, stripped the last shred of masquerade from her outraged form, and brought her back growling and bristling to perch on one arm of the high-backed chair. "Th—ere!" said Flame.