The Admiral spoke bluntly.  “The men don’t feel it that way.  This charity, as you call it, is a memorial to my wife.  The grandfathers of these boys used to see her light in the window of the old house on stormy nights, and they knew that it was an invitation to good cheer.  More than one crew coming in half frozen were glad of the soup and coffee which were sent down to them in cans with baskets of bread.  And this little coffee-room has been the outgrowth of just such hospitality.  There are too many of the men to have in my house.  I simply entertain them elsewhere, and I like to go and talk to them, and sometimes Petronella goes.”

“There’s a picture of dear Aunt Pet hanging there,” said Petronella, “and you can’t imagine how it softens the manners of the men.  It is as if her spirit brooded over the place.  They have made it into a sort of shrine, and they bring shells and queer carved things to put on the shelf below it.”

“In the city we are beginning to think that such methods weaken self-respect.”

“That’s because,” said the wise old Admiral, “in the city there isn’t any real democracy.  You give your friend a cup of coffee and think nothing of it, yet when I give a cup of coffee to a sailor whose grandfather and mine fished together on the banks, you warn me that my methods tend to pauperize.  In the city the poor are never your friends—­in this little town no man would admit that he is less than I. They like my coffee and they drink it.”

Petronella, seeing her chance, took it.  “I think people are horrid to let money make a difference.”

“You say that,” said Hare, “because you have never had to accept favors—­you have, in other words, never been on the other side.”

The Admiral, taking up cudgels for his niece, answered, “If she had been on the other side, she would have taken life as she takes it now—­like a gentleman and a soldier,” and he smiled at Petronella.

Hare had a baffled sense that the Admiral was right—­that Petronella’s fineness and delicacy would never go down in defeat or despair.  She would hold her head high though the heavens fell.  But could any man make such demands upon her?  For himself, he would not.

So he answered, doggedly, “We shall hope she need never be tested.”  And Petronella’s heart sank like lead.

But presently she began to talk about the little tree.  “We have always had it in uncle’s lookout tower.  That was another of dear Aunt Pet’s thoughts for the sailors.  On clear nights they looked through their glasses for the little colored lights, and on stormy nights they knew that back of all the snow was the Christmas brightness.”

“I never had a tree,” said Justin.  “When I was a kiddie we had pretty hard times, and the best Christmas I remember was one when mother made us boys put up a shelf for our books, and she started our collection with ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn.’”