Anne held out her hand with a delightful smile. But Jim Dent would have none of such a sudden accession of reserve, and promptly kissed her, as of old. Whereupon her colour, always interesting to observe, became even more attractive, though she only said, reproachfully: "Don’t you see I’m grown up, Cousin Jim?" Cousin Jim looked her over, from the crown of her charming dark head to the tips of her modishly shod little feet. "Bless your heart, so you are!" he exclaimed. "But will you tell me what that has to do with it?" "Everything. I no longer can be kissed as a matter-of-course," declared Miss Anne Kingsley. "Only by special dispensation." "Well, what do I think of that?" he demanded. "Sure, an’ I don’t know what I think! Still, as I see plenty of mistletoe about"—he had only to reach up a sinewy arm to secure a piece—"I can easily obtain that special dispensation." Whereupon he kissed her again, and with appreciably more fervour than before, having discovered, between the first kiss and the second, that Anne, grown up, was unquestionably more alluring than Anne as he had last seen her, although he remembered that even then he had had premonitions as to her future which he was now not at all surprised to find had been well founded. Feeling that nothing could be better for that heavy heart of his uncle Stephen’s than the application of such balm as lay in a girl’s sweetness, Jim Dent conducted his adorable cousin in to spend the next half-hour beside the invalid’s chair. In this act he showed the difference between himself and the average young man—between the sheep-dog, so to speak, always under the sway of a sense of duty to send his charges where they belong, and the sportive terrier, who thinks of nothing but his own diversion. It must be acknowledged, however, lest this young man be thought quite unnaturally altruistic, that he himself shared with his cousin Anne the pleasant task of making a dear and gentle elderly man forget for a time the load upon his breast, and that the pair of them, while they made merry for the benefit of Uncle Stephen, also laughed into each other’s eyes quite as often as they did into his. Which, of course, gave him fully as much pleasure as it did themselves. "Mother," said Jim Dent in a corner somewhere, "why not take a day off from the fuss and show Aunt Clara how to narrow, or widen, or double up, or whatever she seems to be trying to do, on that pink silk thing she’s knitting? It’s Christmas Eve, and she’s finishing it up to give to Uncle Sam’s baby, and she’s all balled up. She never knit socks before. Somebody else helped her on the other one." "James," said his mother sternly, but not as sternly as she might have spoken if her son’s lips had not lightly kissed her ear before they murmured these words into it, "it is impossible to ignore your aunt’s manner to me."