The old lady, in answer to this, laid down her knitting, folded both arms around Ellen, and, kissing her a great many times, declared she should like anything that came out of that sweet little mouth. As soon as she was set free, Ellen brought her Bible, sat down close beside her, and read chapter after chapter; rewarded even then by seeing that, though her grandmother said nothing, she was listening with fixed attention, bending down over her knitting as if in earnest care to catch every word. And when at last she stopped, warned by certain noises downstairs that her aunt would presently be bustling in, the old lady again hugged her close to her bosom, kissing her forehead and cheeks and lips, and declaring that she was "a great deal sweeter than any sugar-plums;" and Ellen was very much surprised to feel her face wet with a tear from her grandmother's cheek. Hastily kissing her again (for the first time in her life), she ran out of the room, her own tears starting, and her heart swelling big. "Oh! how much pleasure," she thought, "I might have given my poor Grandma, and how I have let her alone all this while! How wrong I have been! But it shan't be so in future!" It was not quite sundown, and Ellen thought she might yet have two or three minutes in the open air. So she wrapped up very warm and went out to the chip-yard. Ellen's heart was very light; she had just been fulfilling a duty that cost her a little self-denial, and the reward had already come; and now it seemed to her that she had never seen anything so perfectly beautiful as the scene before her — the brilliant snow that lay in a thick carpet over all the fields and hills, and the pale streaks of sunlight stretching across it between the long shadows that reached now from the barn to the house. One moment the light tinted the snow-capped fences and whitened barn-roofs; then the lights and the shadows vanished together, and it was all one cold, dazzling white. "Oh, how glorious!" Ellen almost shouted to herself. It was too cold to stand still; she ran to the barnyard to see the cows milked. There they were — all her old friends — Streaky and Dolly, and Jane and Sukey, and Betty Flynn — sleek and contented; winter and summer were all the same to them. And Mr. Van Brunt was very glad to see her there again, and Sam Larkens and Johnny Low looked as if they were too, and Ellen told them with great truth she was very glad indeed to be there; and then she went in to supper with Mr. Van Brunt and an amazing appetite. That was Saturday. Sunday passed quietly, though Ellen could not help suspecting it was not entirely a day of rest to her aunt; there was a savoury smell of cooking in the morning, which nothing that came on the table by any means accounted for; and Miss Fortune was scarcely to be seen the whole day.