inifred, and they looked at the vacant window-sill where they
had left the sweets to cool.

"Mother must have put them in the pantry," said Ruth.

"Of course," Winifred agreed, and the little girls exchanged a smile of
relief as they both turned toward the pantry.

But the candy was not there.

"I'll run and ask her where she put it," said Ruth, and hurried off to
find her mother who was busy in one of the upper rooms.

"But I have not been down-stairs, dear child," Mrs. Pennell replied.
"You do not suppose the molds have fallen out of the window?" she asked,
and without stopping to answer Ruth ran back to the kitchen, and leaned
out of the window, but there was no candy to be seen.

"Oh, Ruth! The box is gone, too! Some one must have come in and taken
it!" said Winifred; and, sure enough, the pretty box had disappeared
from the table as well as the molds from the window. Both the little
girls were ready to cry with disappointment.

They knew that each of the other guests would bring Betty a present, and
they knew also that their mothers could not spare any more sugar for
candy. Besides this the pretty box was gone, and they had no more bits
of paper to make another.

"I shan't go to the party," Ruth declared. "And who could have been mean
enough to take the candy?"

Mrs. Pennell was nearly as troubled as Ruth and Winnie. It was evident
that some one must have entered the house by the front door, taken the
candy, and made off while the girls were in the garden. She feared that
other things must have been taken, but a careful search proved that
nothing else was missing.

Winifred agreed with Ruth that they did not wish to go to the party
without a present for Betty. "And now it is too late to even think of
anything," she said as she started for home, leaving Ruth puzzled and
unhappy, and wondering to herself if perhaps some ill-natured fairies
had not made off with the sweets. The more Ruth thought of this the more
convinced she was that it was what had happened. She remembered hearing
queer little noises at her window that morning that she had thought were
made by the birds nesting in the hawthorn. Now she said to herself that
it must have been fairies coming into the house. "And because I did not
make them welcome they have taken the candy," she decided, remembering a
fairy tale that Mrs. Merrill had once told the two girls in which
children had always welcomed fairies who came tapping at the windows of
a s