Noel's Christmas tree

"Dinah, do hurry up!"

A small boy with close-cropped brown head and dark eager eyes was drumming with his fingers on the windowpane. He turned his head over his shoulder as he spoke, and his tone was impatient.

Dinah, or Diana as she was really called, lay flat on her chest by the schoolroom fire. Big sheets of paper were before her, and with a good deal of sucking of her pencil she was writing rapidly. She was very thin and pale; her nurse said she was wiry, and her fair hair was bobbed in the usual fashion.

"How do you spell alarming, two l's and two m's?" she asked, without raising her head.

"Hurray! Here's the taxi! Such a lot of luggage! You're too late; you can't see it now."

Diana had dashed to the window. They were at the top of a high London house, in one of the quiet roads of South Kensington, but try as they could, they could neither see the cab nor its occupants now, and the