“Oh, you mean Oatley,” laughed Stuart.  “He considers himself the biggest pillar in St. Boniface, if not its chief corner-stone.  Awfully pompous and important, isn’t he?  But they couldn’t get along without him very well.  He is a joke at the bank, where he is a sort of fifth wheel.  They made a place for him there, because he married the president’s daughter, and it was necessary for him to draw a salary.”

One question more and Mary breathed easier.  She had learned the name of the bank, and early in the morning she intended to start out to find it.  With that matter settled it was easy for her to throw herself into the full enjoyment of all that followed.  The Christmas dinner was served in the middle of the day instead of at night, and the afternoon flew by so fast that Eugenia protested against their going when the time came, saying that she had had no visit at all.  Joyce explained that she had promised Mrs. Boyd to help with an entertainment that night for a free kindergarten over on the East Side, and that she must get to work again early in the morning to fill an order for some menu cards she had promised to have ready for the twenty-seventh.

Betty, also, had promised to go back.  Mrs. Boyd was sure she would find material and local colour for several stories, and she felt that it was an opportunity that she could not afford to miss.

“Then Mary must stay with me,” declared Eugenia, and Mary found it hard to refuse her hospitable insistence.  Had it not been for the lost shilling she would have stayed gladly, and once, she was almost on the verge of confessing the real reason to Eugenia.

“I don’t see why I should mind her knowing how much I think of it,” she mused.  “But I don’t want anybody to know.  They’d remember about its being a ‘Philip and Mary shilling,’ and they’d smile at each other behind my back as if they thought I attached some importance to it on that account.”

To the delight of each of the girls, the invitation which they felt obliged to decline was changed to one for the week-end, so when they waved good-bye from the sleigh on their way to the station, it was with the prospect of a speedy return.

“’And they had feasting and merry-making for seventy days and seventy nights,’” quoted Mary, as the train drew into the city.  “I used to wonder how they stood it for such a long stretch, but I know now.  We have been celebrating ever since the mock Christmas tree at Warwick Hall—­ages ago it seems—­but there has been such constant change and variety that my interest is just as keen as when I started.”

Mrs. Boyd and Lucy were at the flat waiting for them when they arrived, and after a light supper, eaten picnic fashion around the chafing-dish, they started off for the novel experience of a Christmas night among the children of the slums.  Betty did find the material which Mrs. Boyd had promised, and came home so eager to begin writing the tale, that she was impatient for morning to arrive.  Joyce found suggestions for two pictures for a child’s story which she had to illustrate the following week, and Mary came home a bundle of tingling sympathies and burning desires to sacrifice her life to some charitable work for neglected children.