The boy cast an abashed glance at her.  The street-lamp shone full on his face, which was round and reddened by the frosty winds, with an aimlessly grinning mouth of uncertain youth, and black eyes with a bold and cheerful outlook on the unknown.  He was only ten, but he was large for his age.  Ellen, when he looked from her grandmother back at her, thought him almost a man, and then she saw that he was the boy who had brought the chestnuts to her the night when she had returned from her runaway excursion.  The boy recognized her at the same moment, and his mouth seemed to gape wider, and a moist red overspread his face down to his swathing woollen scarf.  Then he gave another whoop significant of the extreme of nervous abashedness and the incipient defiance of his masculine estate, there was a flourish of heels, followed by a swift glimmering slide of steel, and he was off trailing his sled.

“That’s that Joy boy that brought Ellen the chestnuts that time,” Fanny said.  “Do you remember him, Ellen?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Ellen.  The look of the boy in her face had bewildered and confused her, without her knowing the why of it.  It was as if she had spelled a word in her reading-book whose meaning she could not grasp.

“I don’t care who he is,” said Mrs. Zelotes, “he ’ain’t no business racin’ out of gates that way, and his folks hadn’t ought to let a boy no older than that out alone of nights.”

They kept on, and the boy apparently left them far behind in his career of youthful exuberance, until they came to the factories.  Andrew looked up at the windows of Lloyd’s, dark except for a faint glimmer in a basement window from the lamp of the solitary watchman, and drew a heavy sigh.

“It ain’t as bad for you as it is for some,” his mother said, sharply, and then she jumped aside, catching her son’s arm as the boy sprang out of a covering shadow under the wall of Lloyd’s and dashed before them with another wild whoop and another glance of defiant bashfulness at Ellen.

“My land! it’s that boy again,” cried Mrs. Zelotes.  “Here, you boy!—­boy!  What’s your name?”

“His name is Granville Joy,” Ellen replied, unexpectedly.

“Why, how did you know, child?” her grandmother asked.  “Seems to me he’s got a highfalutin’ name enough.  Here you, Granville—­if that’s your name—­don’t you know any better than to—­” But the boy was gone, his sled creaking on the hard snow at his heels, and a faint whoop sounded from the distance.

“I guess if I had the bringin’ up of that boy there wouldn’t be such doin’s,” said Mrs. Zelotes, severely.  “His mother’s a pretty woman, but I don’t believe she’s got much force.  She wouldn’t have given him such a name if she had.”

“She named him after the town she came from,” said Fanny.  “She told me once.  She’s a real smart woman, and she makes that boy stand around.”

“She must; it looks as if he was standin’ round pretty lively jest now,” said Mrs. Zelotes.  “Namin’ of a boy after a town!  They’d better wait and name a town after the boy if he amounts to anything.”