“Mother always said I took cold so easily, she didn’t like me to go out in the snow,” Milly objected, shivering a little. “I think I’d rather stay in here by the fire, with Cousin Callie, if you please. Maybe some other time I’ll feel more like going.” The words were civil enough, but Tommy and Erica looked at each other blankly. Afraid of taking cold in that brief, infrequent snow so eagerly waited for by the Nantucket children! But they were too polite—and also too honestly amazed—to voice a further protest, and soon after the long-drawn-out, bountiful Christmas dinner was finished, they took up their skates, harnessed old Polly to the sleigh, and departed for Long Pond, stopping to pile in the young Joys and the Macys on the way. “I should think,” Tommy observed to his cousin, as he saw her struggling with the worn straps of the old skates at the pond’s edge, “that Milly might have lent her new skates to you, as she won’t use them herself. You know, mother really bought them for you in the first place.” Erica bit back a sigh, and answered with a heroic effort at absolute fairness: “Well, I was sort of hoping she’d say something about it. But, of course, she doesn’t know they were meant for me, or that my old ones are in such a state.” She surveyed her feet with a rueful air. “I can make these do another year,” she admitted. “It’s only the thought of her not using the others that makes me a little mad.” “Mother wouldn’t like me to talk about a guest,” Tommy observed, grimly, “but it does seem to me it’s bad enough to have to miss Lis about the house, without——” He didn’t finish his sentence, but Erica put a swift hand on his arm understandingly. “I know,” she agreed. “It’s going to be harder on you than on me, Tommy. I guess Lis’ll be in Canton in another month now, don’t you? D’you suppose he’ll really meet Sun Li?” In the interest of the discussion that followed, Milly Thorne and her irritating qualities were forgotten for the time being. It was, therefore, almost as much of a shock to come home that afternoon, flushed with the cold and exercise, and find her sitting by the fire in her black frock, with her fretful young face and sharp, unfriendly black eyes, as it had been the night before when they had first seen her there. And in the days that followed, neither Tommy nor Erica ever quite lost that first instinctive sense of her being a stranger. It was not that she often did or said anything actively quarrelsome; it was just that she failed utterly to fit into their little circle; so obviously preferring to sit aloof with a book on her lap, but with those strange, unchildlike eyes of hers fixed on the fire instead of the open page before her, that the young Folgers’ efforts to include her in their plans grew more and more half-hearted and perfunctory as time wore on.