gone, even the half-burned
candles with their colored holders, which the men took eagerly and fastened
in their coats, clasping the holders to their lapels or fastening the bent
wire in their buttonholes, and pieces of tinsel rope, which they threw over
their shoulders--so that the tree stood at last just as it was when brought
from the wild woods outside.

Straightway then the young doctor hurried the departure of the merrymakers.
Already the horses stood hitched, and, while the lap-robes were being
carried out, a mountaineer who had brought along a sack of apples lined
up the men and boys, and at a given word started running down the road,
pouring out the apples as he ran while the men and boys scrambled for them,
rolling and tussling in the snow.

Just then a fusillade of shots rang from the top of the mountain, but
nobody paid any heed. As the party moved away, the mountaineers waved
their hands and shouted good-by to the doctor, too shy still to pay much
heed to the other "furriners" in the wagon. The doctor looked back once
with a grateful sigh of relief, but no one in the wagon knew that there
had been any danger that day. How great the danger had been not even the
doctor knew till Pleasant Trouble galloped up and whispered behind his
hand: the coming vandals had got as far as the top of the dividing ridge,
had there quarrelled and fought among themselves, so that, as the party
drove away, one invader was at the minute cursing his captors, who were
setting him free, and high upon the ridge another lay dead in the snow.

That night the doctor and the marquise, well muffled against the cold,
sat on the porch of the superintendent's bungalow while the daughter sat
discreetly inside. The flame-light of the ovens licked the snowy ravine
above and below; it was their first chance for a talk, and they had it
out to the happy end.

"You see," said the doctor, "there is even more to do over here than in
Happy Valley."

"There is much to do everywhere in these hills," said the marquise.

"And _I_ need you--oh, how I do need you!" Most untimely, the daughter
appeared at the door.

"Then you shall have me," whispered the marquise.

"Bedtime!" called the girl, and only with his eyes--just then--could the
doctor kiss the little marquise. But the next morning, when he went with
her as far as the top of the mountain and Pleasant Trouble rode whistling
ahead, he had better luck.

"When?" he asked.

"Not till June," s