“There’s a pretty allegory tucked away in what you just said, Miss Adair, if you look for it. Now will you sing it for me?” said Mr. Lancaster, softly touching the keys. Cis sang, and Anselm Lancaster for the unnumbered time in his knowledge of her, applauded Miss Braithwaite’s wisdom. Cis had a fresh, true young voice, round and sweet, with the quality in it of a boy’s; she had no method whatever, but sang as it had been given to her to sing, yet no artist could better have conveyed the effect of an unearthly narrator, telling the story of the First Christmas. It was a song like the flow of a mountain spring, or the shape of a northern pine, translated into sound. “My dear Miss Adair, that was most beautiful!” Anselm cried sincerely. “It is exactly what it should be. You sound like one of the shepherd boys who sing that hymn on the mountains beyond Rome, or even like one of their pipes! And you speak every word so that the dullest boy will get it.” “I want them to know what it tells them,” said Cis, and Mr. Lancaster noted that she made no disclaimer of his praise, as she made no pose as a singer. She did what she was asked to do as best she could; there it began, there it ended. “Of course they can’t understand the Latin, _Venite adoremus Dominum_, but they are all baptized, and I think we catch a little Latin then, don’t you? It seems to stick to us. I know Latin never seems like something I don’t understand, even when I’m not understanding it, and at high school it never bothered me a bit.” “Do you know the Missal?” asked Anselm Lancaster, interested in this Cis, suddenly friendly toward him and at ease with him. “Miss Braithwaite has been showing it to me, and all about the colors, and the vestments’ meaning; I’m so glad that she has!” cried Cis eagerly. “It’s so splendid, so beautiful, so big and so old! It’s as if I’d been a miserable little scrap of a beggar girl and someone had taken me into a palace with rooms and rooms, and told me it was all mine! Do you know, Mr. Lancaster, it’s scandalous to confess it, but I always thought there was just one Mass; every day the same, three hundred and sixty-five times a year. And here all these collects and prefaces--mercy!” Cis waved her hands as she ended; her delight in recovering her inheritance was unmistakable. “Now I know what Santa--I mean St. Nicholas!--must bring you!” cried Anselm Lancaster, exchanging a glance of pleasure with Miss Braithwaite. Weary, but triumphant, having brought “her ragamuffins’ Christmas tree” to a successful conclusion, Miss Braithwaite took her guests home in her coupé to dine on Christmas Eve. It was another Cis from the one of the night before who sat, pale, with drooping eyes, in her golden gown with its slender line of brown fur, opposite to Mr. Lancaster, talking little, eating indifferently, her face grave, rather than sad, her smile sweet and ready, with a kind of friendly patience new to Cis.