All the way home she kept nervously rehearsing to herself the explanation which she intended to make, so absorbed in her thoughts, that she started guiltily when the girls laughed, and she found that Phil had asked her a question three times without attracting her attention.  When they reached the house it was some time before she could slip upstairs unobserved.  No amateur burglar, afraid of discovery, ever made a more stealthy approach towards his booty than she made towards the telephone.  At any moment some one might come running up to the nursery.  Three times she started out of her door, and each time the upstairs maid came through the hall and she drew back again.

When she finally screwed up her courage to sit down at the desk and find the rector’s number, her heart was beating so fast that her voice trembled, as if she were on the verge of tears.  Luckily the Reverend Eames had just returned to his study and answered immediately.  In her embarrassment she plunged as usual into the middle of her carefully prepared speech, explaining so tremulously and incoherently that for a moment her puzzled listener was doubtful of his questioner’s sanity.  Finally, when made to understand, he was very kind and very sympathetic, but his answer merely sent her on another quest.  She would have to apply to the treasurer, he told her, Mr. Charles Oatley, who always took charge of all collections of the church, depositing them in the bank in the city, in which he was a director.  That was all the information he could give her about it.  Yes, Mr. Oatley lived in the country, near the village, at Oatley Crest.  As this was a holiday, probably he would not take the money to the bank until the following morning.

Hastily thanking him, Mary listened a moment for coming footsteps, then called up Oatley Crest.  To her disappointment a maid answered her.  The family had all gone to take dinner with the James Oatleys, and would not be home until late at night.  No, she did not know where the place was—­some twenty miles away she thought.  They had gone in a touring-car.

Baffled in her pursuit, Mary turned away, perplexed and anxious.  She had forgotten to ask the name of the bank.  But the glimpse she caught of her worried face in a mirror in the hall made her pause to smooth the pucker out of it.

“It is foolish of me to let it spoil my Christmas day like this,” she reasoned with herself.  “If I can’t keep inflexible any better than this I don’t deserve to have fortune change in my favour.”

So armed with the good vicar’s philosophy, she went down to the group in the library.  Almost immediately she had her reward.

“Well, what did you think of the offertory, Miss Mary?” asked Stuart, who had just come in, and was listening to the account that the girls were giving Eugenia of the morning’s music.  “Your sister thinks the soloist had the voice of an angel.”

“I’ll have to confess that I didn’t pay as much attention to that as I did to the first solos,” said Mary honestly.  “I was so busy staring at the fat man who took up the collection in our aisle.  He had at least four chins and was so bald and shiny he fascinated me.  His poor head looked so bare and chilly I really think that must have been what made me sneeze—­just pure sympathy.”