Rising, Jimsy opened his door on a crack and peered cautiously through it. The hallway was dimly alight from a lamp, set, for safety's sake, within a pewter bowl. The house of Sawyer slept. Gathering his train in his hand, Jimsy hurried through the hall and down the stairs to the lower floor, quite dark now, save for barred patches of window framing ghostly landscapes. A gust of wind and snow whirled in as he unbarred the kitchen door. Then something with an ingratiating waggle pushed gladly against his feet. Five seconds later Jimsy and Stump were on their way upstairs.

Excitement exacted its toll. Jimsy halted at the second turn in the upper hall, his scalp feeling very queer. The lamp had gone out, probably in the draft from the kitchen door, and he had lost his room! Whispering desperate admonitions to the wriggling dog beneath his arm, Jimsy went on tiptoed hunt until, finding a window, a turn and a door that seemed familiar, he heaved a great sigh of relief and turned the knob. As he pushed back the door, a flood of light and warmth fanned out, and Jimsy, tangling his feet in his train as only a small boy could, fell headlong into the room, propelling Stump, who yelped with fright, at the very feet of Abner Sawyer.

"Oh, my Gosh!" yelled Jimsy wildly. "Pinched!"

Outraged, the first citizen rose from a bench beside a table and a lamp, and Jimsy, scrambling to his feet, a ridiculous figure of apology and dismay in his billowing train and sagging shoulders, saw that Mr. Sawyer held in his hand a plane and a piece of wood and that the room in which he stood was a work-shop perfect in equipment.

"What," demanded Mr. Sawyer in a terrible voice, "what does this mean? That dog—"

But Jimsy had not heard.

"Lordy," he breathed, "what a thump-walloper of a shop! Whisht Jack Sweeny could see this. My, wouldn't his good eye open! Whatcha makin'?"

Mr. Sawyer reddened as any man may whose weakness has been unexpectedly detected by a boy in an acre of night-shirt.

"No one," he began icily, "no one—not even Mrs. Sawyer presumes to come beyond that threshold"—he broke off and frowned impatiently, feeling his power of aloofness threatened by something in Jimsy's eager stare which claimed a kinship of interest.... There was an alarming suggestion of intimacy anyway in a midnight scene with a tailless dog, a boy clad in your own night-shirt—and an inferential person with an eye by the name of Sweeny.... Why did a ridiculous frozen sense of guilt impede his tongue now when rebuke was imperative?... Why on earth had a look of relief and understanding supplanted the puzzled friendliness of Jimsy's supper-time stare?... So might a dog look who had waggled in friendly perplexity at the foot of a flawless statue only to find that the statue held in its hand a lowly but perfectly comprehensible bone ... and the dog's attitude of course toward the flawless statue would never be quite the same—nor—

"James," said the first citizen hoarsely, "go to bed!"

"Aw," said James softly, "make it Jimsy. Aunt Judith did. I ain't no stiff wit' spinach an' buttons chasin' newsies off the porch."

"Jimsy!" said the first citizen faintly, and felt his world rock about him again. For fate and Jimsy, it was very plain, had filed the