Miss Braithwaite involved Cis in preparations for a Christmas totally unlike any that she had hitherto known. There was to be a tree for her “scalawags,” and it was not hard to interest Cis in this. She went with Miss Braithwaite to see her little ragged boys, and capitulated to them at once, as they did to her. It refreshed Cis to play with them, to talk to them, falling back on the vernacular which she had learned from her newsboys in those old days, hourly becoming more and more unreal to her. There was a small, peaked lame little creature of nine who won and wrung Cis’s heart. She immediately began a glorious warm crimson sweater for him, on which she knit frantically every evening when she was not oversewing tarlatan candy bags with bright worsteds, or assembling and gluing into place the figures for the little, but perfect “Cribs” which each child within Miss Braithwaite’s orbit was to receive to take home at Christmas. She would set up a “Bethlehem” in wretched places, far enough removed in squalor and vicious ignorance from the light of the Star, the chant of the angels. Every one of Father Morley’s girls in his club was to receive a book and some of the useless, pretty things which girls covet. “It’s downright brutal to give only utilitarian things at Christmas!” declared Miss Braithwaite. “It’s a joyous time, and who can be joyous over black stockings and initialed handkerchiefs? The girls must have nonsensical things; dangling, silly vanity-feeders along with their substantial gifts from Father Morley, else Merry Christmas would be mockery said to them.” She put Cis at assorting these gifts, and, being a girl herself who was to be but twenty-two on this same Christmas, she enjoyed her task. Mr. Lancaster often dropped in after dinner, and not infrequently to dine. They all three drew up before the vast hearth, with its jolly fire lighting up Cicely’s red hair, turning it to gold-with-copper-alloy on its surface coils; making a dark warmth below its surfaces, like a low fire on a forge. Cis did not talk much, but she listened, and, listening, found new worlds opening out before her. Both Miss Braithwaite and Mr. Lancaster had been much about Europe; they knew unfrequented corners of it as one knows the places beloved in childhood. “Do you remember, Anselm?” Miss Braithwaite would begin, and then would follow eager reminiscences of dear, queer, crooked streets; a shrine in a cathedral; a room in an ancient palace, or, more delightful still, a sleeping village and the sweet ways of its peasants all informed with faith, the realization of God, and utter trust in Him.