"You don't have us to thank," put in Mrs. McGregor quickly.
"But you surely wouldn't have me be taking a dinner like that and not thanking you for it," said Julie. "And neither O'Dowd nor I had an inkling! Think of our coming up here Christmas morning and all of you keeping so mum!"
"We'd have kept mum longer, if it hadn't been for Nell and Martin," Carl asserted. "I don't see why they couldn't shut up, Ma."
"A secret's no easy treasure to have in one's possession," Mrs. O'Dowd put in quickly. "And you must remember they are but mites—Nell and Martin. Indeed, in my opinion, it's a miracle they didn't blurt it out long before this. You wouldn't get a child of mine to hold his peace any such while; neither the big ones nor the little could do it. Well, well! It was a happy day you gave us and you certainly deserved the dinner you got yourselves. And you had no notion when you sent ours you were to have one of your own."
"No! When it came we thought for a moment you had sent our present back," Carl explained.
"In other words, you were going without your dinner to give it to us," commented Julie.
"We had our tree," Mary interrupted. "We didn't need both things."
"It's few would have done what you did," Julie remarked quietly. "O'Dowd and I will not be forgetting it, either."
Tears came into the eyes of the little woman and as if words failed her she wheeled about and disappeared down the dim hallway.
"At least, she was not put out by our doing it," commented Mrs. McGregor, after her neighbor had gone. "I feared some she might be. But evidently she accepted the gift just as we meant it. So that's settled! Now if we could only find out where our own dinner came from and say as much to its giver, I'd be entirely content. I've taxed my brain until my head is fair aching and still I'm no nearer having an idea where that basket of ours came from than the man in the moon."