"But how could the boys spring their surprise without coming to Hollyhill?" her father asked.
"That's just it," she returned with a quick glance of suspicion toward both her father and her mother. "Do you know, I found myself wondering several times if Clifford wouldn't bring some of those boys down here some time during the holidays."
Mr. Stanlock laughed, but he would have given a good deal to be able to recall the noise he made. It was really a noise, as he must have admitted himself, and so hollow as to indicate something decidedly unlike spontaneous amusement.
Marion caught herself in a brown study several times over these circumstances and her father's manner before she went to sleep that night.
CHAPTER XI.
A MAN OF BIG HEART AND QUEER NOTIONS.
Christmas was a big event at Hollyhill. Hollyhill was well named. Perhaps some old patriarch a century or two back conceived the inspiration of the name while playing Santa Claus with the little tots of the household and pretending to have slid down the chimney without getting a speck of soot on his bulging vestments.
Perhaps he imagined, while mother woke the children and had them peek through a "crack in the door" at the white whiskered visitor stuffing their stockings full of presents, that he had tethered his prancing team of reindeer to a holly tree outside. Certainly there seemed to have been material for such imagination, for tradition said that the hill on which the first houses of the first settlement were built had at one time been richly adorned with a species of American Ilex, and even now there remained here and there carefully preserved remnants of that reported original wealth of the wilderness.
Whether or not this conjectural history of the settlement had anything to do with the cheerful mid-winter holiday developments of the community need not be argued at length. An argument would render the truth flat and insipid if it should prove to be in accord with poetic tradition. So what's the use?