‘Miss Santa Claus’ was the name that Anne had given to a gentlewoman in the apartment below.  Anne had a smiling acquaintance with her and was deeply interested in glimpses of her visitors.  Miss Santa Claus’s real name was Margery Hartman.  Her fair hair was growing silvery, but her cheeks were pink and soft with lingering girlhood and the spirit of eternal youth looked from her clear blue eyes.  She was the district agent of the Associated Charities, and worked untiringly with kind heart and clear head to aid and uplift the poor around her.

One September afternoon, Anne, running up-stairs, bumped against the Charities lady.

“Oh!  I beg your pardon, Miss Santa Claus,” she exclaimed.

The lady laughed.  “That’s a new name for me,” she said.

Anne reddened.  “It just slipped out.  I don’t know your other-folks’ name.  And I call you Miss Santa Claus to myself because you are always giving people things.  I don’t mean to listen,” she explained, “but I can’t help hearing them ask you for coal and shoes and grocery orders.”

“You are my little neighbor on the floor above, aren’t you?” asked the lady.

Anne assented.

“It’s a nice name you’ve given me—­very much nicer than my own real name which happens to be Margery Hartman.  I know your name.  I heard Albert Naumann call you Anne Lewis.”

“You gave Albert shoes to wear to school,” said Anne.

“Yes.  That is my business—­to give things to people who need them.  Kind people provide money for me to help the poor.  Isn’t that good of them?”

“It’s very good,” said Anne, earnestly.  “Do you give them—­shoes, I mean—­to all the children that need them?”

“Not all.”  Miss Hartman smiled and then she sighed.  “I wish I could.”

CHAPTER XXV

The new acquaintance soon ripened into friendship.  Miss Hartman grew very fond of the quaint, affectionate child and Anne said Miss Hartman was “nice as a book.”  She would tell story after story about the children she met in her Charity work and then she would sit at the piano and sing old songs in a sweet, clear voice of the quality that reaches the heart.

Sometimes Anne went to the Charity office and sat mouse-like watching the people who came and went.  One Saturday afternoon, Peggy Callahan hurried into the room, untidy as usual, her eyes shining with excitement.

“Are you the head lady of the Charity?” she asked the lady at the desk.

Miss Margery answered that she was.

“If you please, ma’am, we don’t want to be put away,” Peggy announced.

“Who wants to put you away?  Tell me about it,” said Miss Margery.

“The folks over there.”  The girl nodded her head vaguely.  “They say as how mommer can’t take care of us—­popper he’s got to go to the work’ouse again.  He wa’n’t so very drunk this time but the judge sent him there—­mean old thing!  And they say mommer can’t take care of us and we’ll have to be put away in ’sylums.  And we don’t want to go.  She says if the Charity folks will help with the rent, we can get on.  Don’t none of us eat much and we can do with terrible little,” Peggy concluded breathlessly.