“Has my boy his stocking up?  Such a big boy to have his stocking up!”

He put his chubby hands over her eyes quickly, laughing.

“Don’t look, Charley! don’t!  Benny’s played you a trick now, I tell you!” pulling her towards the fire.  “Now look!  Not Benny’s stocking:  Charley’s, I guess.”

The girl sat down on the cricket, holding him on her lap, playing with the blocks, as much of a child as he.

“Why, Bud!  Such an awful lot of candies that stocking’ll hold!” laughing with him.  “It’ll take all Kriss Kringle’s sack.”

“Kriss Kringle!  Oh, Charley!  I’m too big; I’m five years now.  You can’t cheat me.”

The girl’s very lips went white.  She got up at his childish words, and put him down.

“No, I’ll not cheat you, Benny,—­never, any more.”

“Where are you going, Charley?”

“Just out a bit,” wrapping a plain shawl about her.  “To find Christmas, you know.  For you—­and me.”

He pattered after her to the door.

“You’ll come put me to bed, Charley dear?  I’m so lonesome!”

“Yes, Bud.  Kiss me.  One,—­two,—­three times,—­for God’s good-luck.”

He kissed her.  And Lot went out into the wide, dark world,—­into Christmas night, to find a friend.

She came a few minutes later to a low frame-building, painted brown:  Adam Craig’s house and shop.  The little sitting-room had a light in it:  his wife would be there with the baby.  Lot knew them well, though they never had seen her.  She had watched them through the window for hours in winter nights.  Some damned soul might have thus looked wistfully into heaven:  pitying herself, feeling more like God than the blessed within, because she knew the pain in her heart, the struggle to do right, and pitied it.  She had a reason for the hungry pain in her blood when the kind-faced old cobbler passed her.  She was Nelly’s child.  She had come West to find him.

“Never, that he should know me! never that! but for Benny’s sake.”

If Benny could have brought her to him, saying, “See, this is Charley, my Charley!” But Adam knew her by another name,—­Devil Lot.

While she stood there, looking in at the window, the snow drifting on her head in the night, two passers-by halted an instant.

“Oh, father, look!” It was a young girl spoke.  “Let me speak to that woman.”

“What does thee mean, Maria?”

She tried to draw her hand from his arm.

“Let me go,—­she’s dying, I think.  Such a young, fair face!  She thinks God has forgotten her.  Look!”

The old Quaker hesitated.

“Not thee, Maria.  Thy mother shall find her to-morrow.  Thee must never speak to her.  Accursed!  ’Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.’”

They passed on.  Lot heard it all.  God had offered the pure young girl a chance to save a soul from death; but she threw it aside.  Lot did not laugh:  looked after them with tearless eyes, until they were out of sight.  She went to the door then.  “It’s for Benny,” she whispered, swallowing down the choking that made her dumb.  She knocked and went in.