"I'll ask Ted to let us take his sleigh," Dorothy offered, promptly. "He could go with us to the Corners, and then you could drive."

"And take you?" asked Dr. Gray. "I am sure you young folks have a lot to do this afternoon."

"No matter about that," persisted Dorothy. "If I can help, I am only too glad to do it. And Mr. Wolters is on Aunt Winnie's executive board. He might listen to my appeal."

There was neither time nor opportunity for further conversation, so Dorothy hastily got into her things, and soon she was in Ted's sleigh again, huddled close to Dr. Gray in his big, fur coat.

The plan was unfolded to Ted, and he, anxious to get back to his friends, willingly agreed to walk from the Corners, and there turn the cutter over to the charity workers.

"But Dorothy," he objected, "I know they will all claim I should have insisted on your coming back with me. They will say you will kill yourself with charity, and all that sort of thing."

"Then say I will be home within an hour," Dorothy directed, as Ted jumped on the bob that a number of boys were dragging up the hill. "Good-bye, and thank you for the rig."

"One hour, mind," Ted called back. "You can drive Bess, I know."

"Of course," Dorothy shouted. Then Bess was headed for The Briars, the country home of the millionaire Wolters.

"Suppose he has already made his gift," Dorothy demurred, as she wrapped the fur robe closely about her feet, "and says he can't guarantee any more."

"Then I guess he will have to make another," said the doctor. "I would not be responsible for the life of that child out there in that shack."

"If he agrees, how will you get Mrs. Tripp and Emily out to the sanitarium?" Dorothy asked.

"Have to 'phone to Lakeside, and see if we can get the ambulance," he replied. "That's the only way to move them safely."

It seemed to Dorothy that her plan was more complicated than she had imagined it would be, but it was Christmas time, and doing good for others was in the very atmosphere.

"It will be a new kind of Christmas tree," observed the doctor. "But she's a cunning little one-she deserves to be kept alive."

"Indeed she does," Dorothy said, "and I'm glad if I can help any."

"Why I never would have thought of the plan," said the doctor. "I had been thinking all the time we ought to do something, but Wolters's Christmas gift never crossed my mind. Here we are. My, but this is a great place!" he finished. And the next moment Dorothy had jumped out of the cutter and was at the door of Mr. Ferdinand Wolters.

CHAPTER VI THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Dorothy was scolded. There her own family-father, Joe and Roger, to say nothing of dear Aunt Winnie, and the cousins Ned and Nat-were waiting for her important advice about a lot of Christmas things, and she had ridden off with Dr. Gray, attending to the gloomy task of having a sick child and her mother placed in a sanitarium.

But she succeeded, and when on the following day she visited Emily and her mother, she found the nurses busy in an outer hall, fixing up the Christmas tree that Mr. Sanders had insisted upon bringing all the way from the farmhouse where Dorothy had left it for little Emily.

The very gifts that Dorothy left unopened out there, when she found the child sick, the nurses were placing on the tree, waiting to surprise Emily when she would open her eyes on the real Christmas day.

And there had been added to these a big surprise indeed, for Mr. Wolters was so pleased with the result of his charity, that he added to the hospital donation a personal check for Mrs. Tripp and her daughter. The check was placed in a tiny feed bag, from which a miniature horse (Emily's pet variety of toy) was to eat his breakfast on Christmas morning.

Major Dale did not often interfere with his daughter's affairs, but this time his sister, Mrs. White, had importuned him, declaring that Dorothy would take up charity work altogether if they did not insist upon her taking her proper position in the social world. It must be admitted that the kind old major believed that more pleasure could be gotten out of Dorothy's choice than that of his well-meaning, and fashionable, sister.

But Winnie, he reflected, had been a mother to Dorothy for a number of years, and women, after all, knew best about such things.

It was only when Dorothy found the major alone in his little den off his sleeping rooms that the loving daughter stole up to the footstool, and, in her own childish way, told him all about it. He listened with pardonable pride, and then told Dorothy that too much charity is bad for the health of growing girls. The reprimand was so absurd that Dorothy hugged his neck until he reminded her that even the breath of a war veteran has its limitations.

So Emily was left to her surprises, and now, on the afternoon of the night before Christmas, we find Dorothy and Mabel, with Ned, Nat and Ted, busy with the decorations of the Cedars. Step ladders knocked each other down, as the enthusiastic boys tried to shift more than one to exactly the same spot in the long library. Kitchen chairs toppled over just as Dorothy or Mabel jumped to save their slippered feet, and the long strings of evergreens, with which all hands were struggling, made the room a thing of terror for Mrs. White and Major Dale.

The scheme was to run the greens in a perfect network across the beamed ceiling, not in the usual "chandelier-corner" fashion, but latticed after the style of the Spanish serenade legend.

At intervals little red paper bells dangled, and a prettier idea for decoration could scarcely be conceived. To say that Dorothy had invented it would not do justice to Mabel, but however that may be, all credit, except stepladder episodes, was accorded the girls.

"Let me hang the big bell," begged Ted, "if there is one thing I have longed for all my life it was that-to hang a big 'belle'."

He aimed his stepladder for the middle of the room, but Nat held the bell.

"She's my belle," insisted Nat, "and she's not going to be hanged-she'll be hung first," and he caressed the paper ornament.

"If you boys do not hurry we will never get done," Dorothy reminded them.

"It's almost dark now."

"Almost, but not quite," teased Ted. "Dorothy, between this and dark, there are more things to happen than would fill a hundred stockings. By the way, where do we hang the hose?"

"We don't," she replied. "Stockings are picturesque in a kitchen, but absurd in such a bower as this."

"Right, Coz," agreed Ned, deliberately sitting down with a wreath of greens about his neck. "Cut out the laundry, ma would not pay my little red chop-suey menu last week, and I may have to wear a kerchief on Yule day."

"Oh, don't you think that-sweet!" exulted Mabel, making a true lover's knot of the end of her long rope of green that Nat had succeeded in intertwining with Dorothy's 'cross town line'.

"Delicious," declared Ned, jumping up and placing his arms about her neck.

"Stop," she cried. "I meant the bow."

"Who's running this show, any way?" asked Ted. "Do you see the time, Frats?"

The mantle clock chimed six. Ned and Nat jumped up, and shook themselves loose from the stickery holly leaves as if they had been so many feathers.

"We must eat," declared Ned, dramatically, "for to-morrow we die!"

"We cannot have tea until everything is finished," Dorothy objected. "Do you think we girls can clean up this room?"

"Call the maids in," Ned advised, foolishly, for the housemaids at the Cedars were not expected to clean up after the "festooners."

Dorothy frowned her reply, and continued to gather up the ends of everything. Mabel did not desert either, but before the girls realized it, the boys had run off-to the dining room where a hasty meal, none the less enjoyable, was ready to be eaten.

"What do you suppose they are up to?" Mabel asked.

"There is something going on when they are in such a hurry. What do you say if we follow them? It is not dark, and they can't be going far,"

answered Dorothy.

Mabel gladly agreed, and, a half hour later, the two girls cautiously made their way along the white road, almost in the shadow of three jolly youths. Occasionally they could hear the remarks that the boys made.