ters. Ebenezer stared, grunted, turned to the last page of the
book. There, in bold figures, the other way of the leaf, was his own
accounting. He remembered now--he had kept his first books in the back
of the account book that she had used for the house.

Ebenezer glanced sharply at his bookkeeper. To his annoyance, the man
was smiling with perfect comprehension and sympathy. Ebenezer averted
his eyes, and the bookkeeper felt dimly that he had been guilty of an
indelicacy toward his employer, and hastened to cover it.

"Family life does cling to a man, sir," he said.

"Do you find it so?" said Ebenezer, dryly. "Read, please."

At noon Ebenezer walked home alone through the melting snow. And the
Thought that he did not think, but that spoke to him without his
knowing, said:--

"Winning a puzzle--Two Dollars and a half. She never told me she tried
to earn a little something that way."

VIII

"If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed
Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?"

"Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of
adults.

"Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner
of youth.

"And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis'
Winslow suggested with diplomacy.

On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence.

But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult
manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry
window at the sparrows on the bird box.

"It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to
have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to
her, so."

He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard
no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of
the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen
Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or
in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to
informalities.

Ellen was cleaning her silver. She had "six of each"--six knives, six
forks, six spoons, all plated and seldom used, pewter with black handles
serving for every day. The silver was cleaned often, though it was never
on the table, save for company, and there never had been any company
since Ellen had lost her little boy from fever. Having no
articulateness and having no other outlet for emotion, she fed her grief
b