The boy was better.  Peter shook his head over any permanent improvement, but Anna fiercely seized each crumb of hope.  Many and bitter were the battles she and Peter fought at night over his treatment, frightful the litter of authorities Harmony put straight every morning.

The extra expense was not much, but it told.  Peter’s carefully calculated expenditures felt the strain.  He gave up a course in X-ray on which he had set his heart and cut off his hour in the coffee-house as a luxury.  There was no hardship about the latter renunciation.  Life for Peter was spelling itself very much in terms of Harmony and Jimmy those days.  He resented anything that took him from them.

There were anxieties of a different sort also.  Anna’s father was failing.  He had written her a feeble, half-senile appeal to let bygones be bygones and come back to see him before he died.  Anna was Peter’s great prop.  What would he do should she decide to go home?  He had built his house on the sand, indeed.

So far the threatened danger of a mother to Jimmy had not materialized.  Peter was puzzled, but satisfied.  He still wrote letters of marvelous adventure; Jimmy still watched for them, listened breathless, treasured them under his pillow.  But he spoke less of his father.  The open page of his childish mind was being written over with new impressions.  “Dad” was already a memory; Peter and Harmony and Anna were realities.  Sometimes he called Peter “Dad.”  At those times Peter caught the boy to him in an agony of tenderness.

And as the little apartment revolved round Jimmy, so was this Christmas-Eve given up to him.  All day he had stayed in bed for the privilege of an extra hour propped up among pillows in the salon.  All day he had strung little red berries that looked like cranberries for the tree, or fastened threads to the tiny cakes that were for trimming only, and sternly forbidden to eat.

A marvelous day that for Jimmy.  Late in the afternoon the Portier, with a collar on, had mounted the stairs and sheepishly presented him with a pair of white mice in a wooden cage.  Jimmy was thrilled.  The cage was on his knees all evening, and one of the mice was clearly ill of a cake with pink icing.  The Portier’s gift was a stealthy one, while his wife was having coffee with her cousin, the brushmaker.  But the spirit Of Christmas does strange things.  That very evening, while the Portier was roistering in a beer hall preparatory to the midnight mass, came the Portier’s wife, puffing from the stairs, and brought a puzzle book that only the initiated could open, and when one succeeded at last there was a picture of the Christ-Child within.

Young McLean came to call that evening—­came to call and remained to worship.  It was the first time since Mrs. Boyer that a visitor had come.  McLean, interested with everything and palpably not shocked, was a comforting caller.  He seemed to Harmony, who had had bad moments since the day of Mrs. Boyer’s visit, to put the hallmark of respectability on the household, to restore it to something it had lost or had never had.