"Who's there?" repeated Miss Jerusha, sharply. "It's only _me_--please let me in," answered a faint voice. To Miss Jerusha it sounded like the voice of a child, but still suspicious of her visitor, she only called: "What do you want?" "Oh, please open the door--I'm _so_ cold!" was the answer, in a faint, shivering voice that was drowned in another shriek of the storm. Miss Jerusha was no coward; so, first arming herself with a pair of tongs, having some vague idea she might find them useful, she pulled open the door, admitting a wild drift of wind, and snow, and sleet, and, blown in with it, the small, slight figure of a child--no one else. Miss Jerusha closed the door, folded her arms, and looked at her unexpected visitor. Little Fly, too, so far recovered from her terror as to lift her woolly head and favor the new-comer with an open mouth and eyes astare. It was a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years of age, wretchedly clad, but so white with the drifting snow that it was impossible to tell what he wore. His face was thin, pinched, and purple with the cold, his fingers red and benumbed, his teeth chattering either with fear or cold. As Miss Jerusha continued to stare at him in severest silence, he lifted a pair of large, dark, melancholy eyes wistfully, pleadingly, to her hard, grim face. "Well," said the spinster, at last, drawing a deep breath, and surveying him from head to foot--"well, young man, what do _you_ want, if a body may ask?" "Please ma'am, I want you to come and see mother--she's sick," said the child, dropping his eyes under the stern gaze bent upon him. "Oh, you do? I hain't the least doubt of it!" said Miss Jerusha, sarcastically. "Should hev bin 'sprised if you _hadn't_. I was jest a sayin' I 'spected to see somebody comin' for me to see their mother or something. Nobody could die, of course, unless I trudged through the snow and storm to see 'em off. Of course, it wouldn't do to let a particerlerly stormy night come without bringing _me_ out through it, giving me the rheumatiz in all my bones and a misery in the rest o' my limbs. Oh, no, in course it wouldn't. And who may your mother happen to be, young man?" concluded Miss Jerusha, changing with startling abruptness from the intensely ironical to the most searching severity. "Why, she's _mother_," said the boy, simply, lifting his dark, earnest eyes again to that set, rigid face; "she is in that old house over there, and she--is going to die." His lip quivered, his eyes filled and saddened, and he drew a long, shivering breath, and swallowed very fast to keep back his tears. Brave little heart! hiding his own grief lest it might offend that sour-looking gorgon and keep her from visiting "mother."