"Good-night," replied Tavia.

But Tavia's head did not ache. She "tumbled in" as she promised, but did
not immediately try to sleep. She was, instead, trying to arrange some
things clearly before her much-confused faculties--trying to decide what
she should write home. She had her mother's pin and Johnnie's steam
engine, thanks to Dorothy's good nature, but what about paying Dorothy
back? Where was the money to come from, and what possible explanation
could she make? Tell her she had not spent her own five dollars, but
instead had mailed it to a strange woman in a strange place, on the
printed promise that in place of five she would get--

"But how on earth can I ever tell so silly a thing to Dorothy?" she found
herself answering. "Why, it is too absurd--"

She deliberately got out of bed, went to the drawer of her dresser and
took from it an envelope. It was the very one she had dropped in the
train, and which the strange woman noticed.

Closing the door softly, Tavia took from the blue envelope a printed slip.
She looked it over critically, then with a look of utter disgust replaced
it in the envelope, and folding that so it would fit into a very small
compass, put it away again.

"And to think I should have gotten Nat into such a thing!" she was
thinking. "It was good of him to be so nice about it--but, all the same, I
did feel awfully, and I wish this very minute I was at home in my own
shabby little room, next to Johnnie's."

Tavia rarely cried, but this time she felt there was simply nothing else
left to do. Bravely she struggled to choke her sobs; then at last fixing
her mind successfully upon a plan to straighten out her difficulties (or,
at least, she thought it would adjust them), the girl with the
tear-stained, hazel eyes and the much-tangled, bronze braids, found
herself forgetting where she was, what she was thinking about, whether she
was Nat or Dorothy.

And then Tavia was asleep.

The cracking of everything out of doors next morning brought both Tavia
and Dorothy to the realization of the fact that another day had
come--another day bitterly cold.

They had hoped for snow, but Tavia, being first to reach the window,
called to Dorothy that not a single flake had fallen.

"Then perhaps we can ride out to the woods and get a Christmas tree,"
said Dorothy, mindful of little Roger's wish of the previous night.

"We would freeze," declared Tavia. "Why, everything is snapping and
cracking--but th