* * * * *

Great was the surprise at the brown cottage, when, on the very night before Christmas, the box arrived and was deposited in the dining room, where Guy and Julia, Miss Barker and Daisy gathered eagerly around it, the latter exclaiming: 

“I knows where it tum from, I do.  My sake-name, Miss McDolly, send it, see did.  I writ and ask her would see an’ she hab.”

“What!” Guy said, as, man-like, he began deliberately to untie every knot in the string which his wife in her impatience would have cut at once.  “What does the child mean?  Do you know, Julia?”

“I do.  I’ll explain,” Miss Barker said, and in as few words as possible she told what she had done, while Julia listened with a very grave face, and Guy was pale even to his lips as he went on untying the string and opening the box.

There was a letter lying on the top which he handed to Julia, who steadied her voice to read aloud: 

“New York, December 22, 18—.

“Darling little sake-name Daisy:  Your letter made Miss McDolly very happy, and she is so glad to send you the doll with a shash, and the other toys.  Write to me again and tell me if they suit you.  God bless you, sweet little one, is the prayer of

“Miss MCDONALD.”

After that the grave look left Julia’s face, and Guy was not quite so pale, as he took out one after another the articles which little Daisy hailed with rapturous shouts and exclamations of delight.

“Oh, isn’t she dood, and don’t you love her, papa?” she said, while Guy replied: 

“Yes, it was certainly very kind in her, and generous.  No other little girl in town will have such a box as this.”

He was very pale, and there was a strange look in his eyes, but his voice was perfectly natural as he spoke, and one who knew nothing of his former relations to Miss McDonald would never have suspected how his whole soul was moved by this gift to his little daughter.

“You must write and thank her,” he said to Julia, who, knowing that this was proper, assented without a word, and when on the morning after Christmas Miss McDonald opened with trembling hands the envelope bearing the Cuylerville postmark, she felt a keen pang of disappointment in finding only a few lines from Julia expressive of her own and little Daisy’s thanks for the beautiful Christmas box, “which made our little girl so happy.”

Not Julia, but Mrs. Guy, and that hurt Daisy more than anything else.

“Mrs. Guy Thornton!  Why need she thrust upon me the name I used to bear?” she whispered, and her lip quivered a little, and the tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered all that lay between the present and the time when she had been Mrs. Guy Thornton.

She was Miss McDonald now, and Guy was another woman’s husband, and with a bitter pain in her heart, she put away Julia’s letter, saying as she did so, “And that’s the end of that.”