nodded and held out his hands for the star; and as he clasped
it a wonderful, shining smile came over his face.

The next morning the little boy's room was very still and dark.

The golden piece of paper that had been the star lay on a table beside
the bed, its five points very sharp and bright.

But it was not the real star, any more than a person's body is the real
person.

The real star was living and shining now in the little boy's heart, and
it had gone out with him into a new and more beautiful sky country than
it had ever known before--the sky country where the little child angels
live, each one carrying in its heart its own particular star.

XVIII. THE QUEEREST CHRISTMAS*

* This story was first published in the Youth's Companion, vol. 83.

GRACE MARGARET GALLAHER

Betty stood at her door, gazing drearily down the long, empty corridor
in which the breakfast gong echoed mournfully. All the usual brisk
scenes of that hour, groups of girls in Peter Thomson suits or starched
shirt-waists, or a pair of energetic ones, red-cheeked and shining-eyed
from a run in the snow, had vanished as by the hand of some evil
magician. Silent and lonely was the corridor.

"And it's the day before Christmas!" groaned Betty. Two chill little
tears hung on her eyelashes.

The night before, in the excitement of getting the girls off with all
their trunks and packages intact, she had not realized the homesickness
of the deserted school. Now it seemed to pierce her very bones.

"Oh, dear, why did father have to lose his money? 'Twas easy enough last
September to decide I wouldn't take the expensive journey home these
holidays, and for all of us to promise we wouldn't give each other as
much as a Christmas card. But now!" The two chill tears slipped over the
edge of her eyelashes. "Well, I know how I'll spend this whole day; I'll
come right up here after breakfast and cry and cry and cry!" Somewhat
fortified by this cheering resolve, Betty went to breakfast.

Whatever the material joys of that meal might be, it certainly was not
"a feast of reason and a flow of soul." Betty, whose sense of humour
never perished, even in such a frost, looked round the table at the
eight grim-faced girls doomed to a Christmas in school, and quoted
mischievously to herself: "On with the dance, let joy be unconfined."

Breakfast bolted, she lagged back to her room, stopping to stare out of
the corridor windows.

She saw nothing of the sno