We stared in one another’s faces, feeling guilty of a kind of disloyalty, yet compelled to acknowledge this great truth. In our hearts we remembered to have noticed this thing before: That getting ready for a thing was more fun than doing that thing. “Why couldn’t we get a quest?” inquired Margaret Amelia. “Then it wouldn’t have to stop. It’d last every day.” That was the obvious solution: We would get a quest. “Girls can’t quest, can they?” Betty suggested doubtfully. We looked in one another’s faces. Could it be true? Did the damsels sit at home? Was it only the knights who quested? Delia was a free soul. Forthwith she made a precedent. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know whether they did quest. But they can quest. So let’s do it.” The reason in this appealed to us all. Immediately we confronted the problem: What should we quest for? We stared off over the valley through which the little river ran shining and slipped beyond our horizon. “I wonder,” said Mary Elizabeth, “if it would be wrong to quest for the Holy Grail _now_.” We stood there against the west, where bright doors seemed opening in the pouring gold of the sun, thick with shining dust. The glory seemed very near. Why not do something beautiful? Why not--why not.... The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same author, and new fiction _By the Same Author_ Christmas BY ZONA GALE Author of “Mothers to Men,” “The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre.” Illustrated in colors by LEON SOLON. _Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.30 net; postpaid, $1.42_ A town in the Middle West, pinched with poverty, decides that it will have no Christmas, as no one can afford to buy gifts. They perhaps foolishly reckon that the heart-burnings and the disappointments of the children will be obviated by passing the holiday season over with no observance. How this was found to be simply and wholly impossible, how the Christmas joys and Christmas spirit crept into the little town and into the hearts of its most positive objectors, and how Christmas cannot be arbitrated about, make up the basis of a more than ordinarily appealing novel. Incidentally it is a little boy who really makes possible a delightful outcome. A thread of romance runs through it all with something of the meaning of Christmas for the individual human being and for the race. “A fine story of Yuletide impulses in Miss Gale’s best style.”--_N. Y. World._ “No living writer more thoroughly understands the true spirit of Christmas than does Zona Gale.”--_Chicago Record-Herald._ “‘Christmas’ is that rare thing, a Yuletide tale, with a touch of originality about it.”--_N. Y. Press._ “The book is just the thing for a gift.”--_Chicago Tribune._ _The Other Books of Miss Gale_ Mothers to Men _Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.50 net; by mail, $1.62 net_