A moment more and his thoughts were back with the Captain. "The wind," he thought, "will be whistling about the corners of skyscrapers tonight. The snow will go scooting and whirling away and away just as it does among the crags of the Rockies. Cities are like that. Wonder where the Captain is now?" Then again he seemed to hear the Captain's rumbling voice as in this very room he told of his boyhood days. "That is the very stove--" He spoke aloud now. Pretty Alice LeClare turned her shining black eyes upon him. "It's the very stove that burned here many years ago when the Captain was a boy. He found it in the barn loft. "And these chairs," he went on, "are the very chairs on which he hung his stockings so long ago. He found them in the attic, bottoms gone, some broken. He had them restored. Seems--" His voice went husky. "Seems almost a sacred place." "It _is_ sacred," Alice whispered back. "The boyhood home of a good man, the things he loved, are _always_ sacred." Johnny could have loved the little French Canadian for that speech. "And what a privilege," Alice murmured low, "just for one night to live as he lived, so simple, so plain, so true. To hang up our stockings, feeling that they will be filled, not by lavish hands, but by loving ones, with the simple things that only real love can find." "But listen!" Johnny touched her arm. "How that windmill screams! It seems a--a sort of warning. Perhaps our night will not be so serene after all. Per--" He broke short off. From the wall where the broad reflector stood facing the open window there had come a sound. "Like a whisper," Johnny thought. Whisper or not, it made no sense. So again the room fell into silence. Only the crackle of the fire, the racing tick-tock, tick-tock of the little clock on the mantel told that this little gray house was still the habitation of man. * * * * * * * * That night, over a cup of tea in Grace Krowl's parlor, with the Whisperer looking on "from his tower a mile away" Nida McFay told her story. It was a strange story filled with smiles and tears. For three glorious years she had worked in the book department of one of America's most beautiful stores. Surrounded by books, with congenial fellow workers and cultured customers, she had learned what it meant to truly live. "And then--" The little book seller looked away. "Then a man, a very little, wistful old man who lived in my rooming house, brought me some books from his library; anyway, he said they were from his library. He asked me to sell them for him at a second-hand store. "They were valuable books. I--I sold them." She paused to sit for a time staring into her tea cup. It was as if she sensed the fact that someone was looking in upon them from afar, and that she dreaded to go on. From the reflector in the corner came a strange sound. "Like someone stifling a cough," Grace thought with a shudder.