"O, well," she said at last, "roast beef is fillin’, even if ’tain’t what you could call temptin’. I s’pose it’s my complication that makes me peckish about my victuals." She turned sharply upon the children, who were nudging one another, repeating with joyful giggles, "Mince pie!" "Jelly!" Her frown reduced them to instant gravity. "What ails you, anyway?" demanded Mrs. Dunn. "Act like you never had a Christmas dinner in all your lives." Peggy steered the conversation from the delicate subject by opening the other basket, and now it would have taken more than Mrs. Dunn’s frown to have suppressed the children’s hilarity. There was a chorus of voices, shrill squeals, which might have expressed almost anything from acute physical anguish to ecstasy, and really did stand for the latter, gurgles of excited laughter, questions that ran into one another, without waiting for answers, a medley of happy voices which perhaps comes the nearest to perfect Christmas music than any since Bethlehem. "Look, Ma. It’s got shoes and stockings." "There’s animals in this here house. It’s a zoolog’cal garden." "See the baby! Don’t he like Christmas, though!" The baby, indeed, was entering splendidly into the spirit of the occasion. A rattle in one hand, a rubber cow in the other, he regarded his laughing brothers and sisters with a responsive grin, revealing gums guiltless of teeth. "The dear!" said Peggy with a little gulp, for all this artless joy had touched some of those sensitive nerves which lie between pain and pleasure. Peggy was laughing with the rest, but her eyes were dewy. A mew outside of the door broke in on this hilarity. "It’s Jimmy’s kitty," screamed Estelle, crossing the kitchen with a hop, skip and jump. "She knows Christmas has come and she wants to be in it." The kitten for whose rescue Jimmy Dunn had fought so valiantly, showed great improvement over her miserable self on the occasion which Peggy so vividly remembered. She could not be called a handsome cat, even now. A fractured tail had been among the injuries sustained in the hardships of her earlier existence, and that member was carried on one side, in a manner suggesting excessive weight. Though no longer muddy, her fur was by no means clean, and the hollowness of her sides reflected on the Dunns’ bounty. Yet she purred, as she entered, arching her back, and craning her neck under Estelle’s caresses in a fashion which proved conclusively that though the fare night be meagre at times there was no lack of kindness in the Dunn establishment for the little outcast.