And again when, to make sure that nobody had been left out, though all the presents were gone, the master of ceremonies asked if there was any other little boy or girl who had received nothing, there arose a bent, toothless old woman in a calico dress and baggy black coat, her gray hair straggling from under her black sunbonnet and her hands gnarled and knotted from work and rheumatism. Simply as a child she spoke: "I ain't got nothin'." Gravely the giver of the gifts asked her to come forward, and while, nonplussed, he searched the tree for the most glittering thing he could find, a tiny gold safety-pin was thrust into his hand, the whiter hollow of the marquise's white throat became visible, and that old woman was made till death the proudest in the hills. Then all the women pressed forward and then the men, until all the ornaments were gone, even the half-burned candles with their colored holders, which the men took eagerly and fastened in their coats, clasping the holders to their lapels or fastening the bent wire in their buttonholes, and pieces of tinsel rope, which they threw over their shoulders--so that the tree stood at last just as it was when brought from the wild woods outside. Straightway then the young doctor hurried the departure of the merrymakers. Already the horses stood hitched, and, while the lap-robes were being carried out, a mountaineer who had brought along a sack of apples lined up the men and boys, and at a given word started running down the road, pouring out the apples as he ran while the men and boys scrambled for them, rolling and tussling in the snow. Just then a fusillade of shots rang from the top of the mountain, but nobody paid any heed. As the party moved away, the mountaineers waved their hands and shouted good-by to the doctor, too shy still to pay much heed to the other "furriners" in the wagon. The doctor looked back once with a grateful sigh of relief, but no one in the wagon knew that there had been any danger that day. How great the danger had been not even the doctor knew till Pleasant Trouble galloped up and whispered behind his hand: the coming vandals had got as far as the top of the dividing ridge, had there quarrelled and fought among themselves, so that, as the party drove away, one invader was at the minute cursing his captors, who were setting him free, and high upon the ridge another lay dead in the snow. That night the doctor and the marquise, well muffled against the cold, sat on the porch of the superintendent's bungalow while the daughter sat discreetly inside. The flame-light of the ovens licked the snowy ravine above and below; it was their first chance for a talk, and they had it out to the happy end. "You see," said the doctor, "there is even more to do over here than in Happy Valley." "There is much to do everywhere in these hills," said the marquise. "And _I_ need you--oh, how I do need you!" Most untimely, the daughter appeared at the door.