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“If I hurry enough,” said the Lay Reader quite impulsively, “may I have a kiss when I get back?”

“A kiss?” hooted Flame. In the curve of her cheek a dimple opened suddenly. “Well … maybe,” said Flame.

As though the word were wings the Lay Reader snatched his hat and sped out into the night.

It was astonishing how all the warm housey air seemed to rush out with him, and all the shivery frost rush back.

A little bit listlessly Flame dragged down the bandage from her eyes.

“It must be the creaks on the stairs that make it so awfully lonely all of a sudden,” argued Flame. “It must be because the dogs snore so…. No mere man could make it so empty.” With a precipitous nudge of the memory she dashed to the door and helloed to the fast retreating figure. “Oh, Bertrand! Bertrand!” she called, “I got sort of mixed up. It’s the second door on the left! And if you don’t find ’em there you’d better go up in Mother’s room and turn out the silver chest! Hurry!”

Rallying back to the bright Christmas kitchen for the real business at hand, an accusing blush rose to the young spot where the dimple had been.

“Oh, Shucks!” parried Flame. “I kissed a Bishop before I was five!–What’s a Lay Reader?” As one humanely willing to condone the future as well as the past she rolled up her white sleeves without further introspection, and dragged out from the protecting shadow of the sink the “humpiest box” which had so excited her emotions at home in an earlier hour of the day. Cracklingly under her eager fingers the clumsy cover slid off, exposing once more to her enraptured gaze the gay-colored muslin layer of animal masks leering fatuously up at her.

Only with her hand across her mouth did she keep from crying out. Very swiftly her glance traveled from the grinning muslin faces before her to the solemn fur faces on the other side of the room. The hand across her mouth tightened.

“Why, it’s something like Creation,” she giggled. “This having to decide which face to give to which animal!”

As expeditiously as possible she made her selection.

“Poor Miss Flora must be so tired of being so plain,” she thought. “I’ll give her the first choice of everything! Something really lovely! It can’t help resting her!”

With this kind idea in mind she selected for Miss Flora a canary’s face.–Softly yellow! Bland as treacle! Its swelling, tender muslin throat fairly reeking with the suggestion of innocent song! No one gazing once upon such ornithological purity would ever speak a harsh word again, even to a sparrow!

Nudging Miss Flora cautiously from her sonorous nap, Flame beguiled her with half a doughnut to her appointed chair, boosted her still cautiously to her pinnacle of books, and with various swift adjustments of fasteners, knotting of tie-strings,–an extra breathing hole jabbed through the beak, slipped the canary’s beautiful blond countenance over Miss Flora’s frankly grizzled mug.

For a single terrifying instant Miss Flora’s crinkled sides tightened,–a snarl like ripped silk slipped through her straining lungs. Then once convinced that the mask was not a gas-box she accepted the liberty with reasonable sang-froid and sat blinking beadily out through the canary’s yellow-rimmed eye-sockets with frank curiosity towards such proceedings as were about to follow. It was easy to see she was accustomed to sitting in chairs.

For the Wolf Hound Flame chose a Giraffe’s head. Certain anatomical similarities seemed to make the choice wise. With a long vividly striped stockinet neck wrinkling like a mousquetaire glove, the neat small head that so closely fitted his own neat small head, the tweaked, interrogative ears,–Beautiful-Lovely, the Wolf Hound, reared up majestically in his own chair. He also, once convinced that the mask was not a gas-box, resigned himself to the inevitable, and corporeally independent of such vain props as Chemistries or Sermons, lolled his fine height against the mahogany chair-back.