She came in a spotless apron no whiter than her hair. She was spare--Aunt Judith Sawyer--spare and patient as the wife of a provident man may well be who sees no need for servants, and her primness was of a gentler, vaguer sort than that of Abner Sawyer. Jimsy glanced up into her sweet, tired face and his eager eyes claimed her with a bewildering smile of welcome. Then because Jimsy's experience with clean aprons and trimly parted hair was negligible almost to the point of non-existence, it became instantly imperative that he should polish the toe of one worn shoe with the sole of the other and study the result and Aunt Judith with furtive interest. "Judith," said the first citizen, not wholly at his ease, "Mr.--er--ah--Mr. Jimsy has arrived." Jimsy snickered. "Naw, naw, nix!" he said. "Jimsy's the handle. I'm a stray, I am. Hain't got no folks. Mom Dorgan says ye have to have folks to have a bunch-name. I'm the Christmas kid." "To be sure you are," said Aunt Judith gently, "to be sure. And where are your things?" Jimsy's thin little face reddened. "Hain't only got one rig," he mumbled, "an' that warn't fitten to wear. Mom Dorgan borried these duds fur me. She--she's awful good that way when she's sober." There was wistful eagerness in his face to do his best by the one friend who helped him. [Illustration] Quite unconscious of the scandalized flutter in this quiet room whose oval portraits of ancestral Sawyers might well have tumbled down at the notion of any one being anything but sober, the boy moved closer to the fire as if the ride had chilled him. [Illustration] "Gee!" he said with a long, quivering breath, "ain't that a fire, now, ain't it!" and because his keen young eyes could not somehow be evaded, Abner Sawyer accepted the responsibility of the reply and said hastily that it was. Then feeling his dignity imperilled in the presence of Judith, though why he could not for the life of him explain, he moved forward a chair for the Christmas guest and returned to his paper. Aunt Judith went back to a region of tinkling china and humming kettle. The room became quiet enough for any one to read, but the first citizen somehow could not read. He was ridiculously conscious of that tense little figure by the fire with the disturbingly friendly eyes. How on earth could a boy be noisy who was absolutely quiet? Yet his very presence seemed to clamor--the clamor of an inherent sociability repressed with difficulty. Jimsy glanced at the checkerboard window beyond which snowy hills lay beneath a sunset afterglow. "Gee whiz!" he burst forth. "_Ain't_ the snow white!" The first citizen jumped--much as one may jump when he has waited in nerve-racking suspense for a pistol shot. The boy had done exactly what he had expected him to do--broken that sacred ante-prandial hour with the Lindon _Evening News_ which Judith had not broken this twenty years. [Illustration]