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Very definitely then, with quick deeds, incisive words, he separated the immediate combatants, and ordered the other dogs into submission.

“Here you, Demon Direful!” he addressed the white Wolf Hound. “Drop that, Orion!” he shouted to the Irish Setter. “Cut it out, John!” he thundered at the Coach Dog.

“Their names are ‘Beautiful-Lovely’!” cried Flame. “And ‘Lopsy!’ and ‘Blunder-Blot!'”

With his hand on the Wolf Hound’s collar, the Stranger stopped and stared up with frank astonishment, not to say resentment, at the girl’s interference.

“Their names are what?” he said.

Something in the special intonation of the question infuriated Flame…. Maybe she thought his mouth scornful,–his narrowing eyes…? Goodness knows what she thought of his suddenly narrowing eyes!

In an instant she had jumped from her retreat to the floor.

“Who are you, anyway?” she demanded. “How dare you come here like this? Butting into my party!… And–and spoiling my discipline with the dogs! Who are you, I say?”

With Demon Direful, alias Beautiful-Lovely tugging wildly at his restraint, the Stranger’s scornful mouth turned precipitously up, instead of down.

“Who am I?” he said. “Why, no one special at all except just–the Master of the House!”

“What?” gasped Flame.

“Earle Delcote,” bowed the Stranger.

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.

Glancing up from this innocent triumph, she encountered the eyes of the Master of the House fixed speculatively on the big turkey.

“I’m afraid everything is very cold,” she confided with distinctly formal regret.

“Not for anything,” laughed Delcote quite suddenly, “would I have kept you waiting–if I had only known.”

Two spots of color glowed hotly in the girl’s cheeks.

“It was not for you I was waiting,” she said coldly.

“N–o?” teased Delcote. “You astonish me. For whom, then? Some incredible wight who, worse than late–isn’t going to show up at all?… Heaven sent, I consider myself…. How else could so little a girl have managed so big a turkey?”

“There … isn’t any … carving knife,” whispered Flame.

The tears were glistening on her cheeks now instead of just in her eyes. A less observing man than Delcote might have thought the tears were really for the carving knife.

“What? No carving knife?” he roared imperiously. “And the house guaranteed ‘furnished’?” Very furiously he began to hunt all around the kitchen in the most impossible places.