Then she produced the five dollars, which was wrapped with other bills, quite bewildering to the boys, in folds of white cloth and hidden deep within her gold-laced bodice; but she did not give it to them until she had exacted from each a twofold promise of upright living in the future and of reimbursement from their own earnings in the spring. Sitting at the foot of the boulder in the middle of their circle, she made a swift reckoning of the amount due her from each boy, which amounts she wrote on slips of paper, a separate slip for the pocket of each blouse. Only to John she gave none, considering him more sinned against than sinning, and warning them all against leading those younger than themselves into wrongdoing. Him she kept with her, reluctant as he was for once to stay, while she sent the others, in whose breasts relief was fast conquering repentance, on a two-mile journey through the woods to apologize to the farmer and to pay their just indebtedness. Be it said to her credit that she collected the five dollars, even to the uttermost farthing. It was returned to her the following spring, as she had demanded, by boys who approached her singly from every conceivable hiding-place along the road and proffered hard-earned coins in bits of dirty paper. Be it said, too, that two months after the incident by the boulder, her own conscience troubling her by the thought that she might have wronged him who had been for so long her friend, she wrote a full account of it to Mr. Wescott, confessing freely her part as protector, but asking that, if possible, the children be not punished. Mr. Wescott smiled over Mary Christmas’ letter, which he shared with Mrs. Wescott in the seclusion of the library. It lacked the ease and growing accuracy of her speech, and was, in parts, with its self-abasement and anxious queries, inexpressibly funny. Then, because he was conservative in parenthood as well as in politics, he said not a word to John and Roger, though he did contrive that winter to put in the way of his older son more than the usual opportunities for earning an honest penny. There were other affairs of far less serious nature in which Mary Christmas played the part of a confidante and friend, not to the Wescotts alone but to many other children in their village and in other villages along the coast of Maine. So many in fact were there that these pages cannot attempt to chronicle them; but one other they must relate because of its immediate importance to at least one of the Wescotts, and its later tremendous significance to the family at large.