beside him. The Banker smiled and parted his lips to speak, but the
Doctor interrupted him.

"Well, old friend!" he cried heartily. "What happened to you? Here we
are back all safely."

The Banker shook his friend's hand with emotion; then after a moment he
sat up and looked about him. The room seemed full of people--strange
looking figures, in extraordinary costumes, dirty and torn. The Very
Young Man crowded forward.

"We got back, sir, didn't we?" he said.

The Banker saw he was holding a young girl by the hand--the most
remarkable-looking girl, the Banker thought, that he had ever beheld.
Her single garment, hanging short of her bare knees, was ragged and
dirty; her jet black hair fell in tangled masses over her shoulders.

"This is Aura," said the Very Young Man. His voice was full of pride;
his manner ingenuous as a child's.

Without a trace of embarrassment the girl smiled and with a pretty
little bending of her head, held down her hand to the astonished Banker,
who sat speechless upon his mattress.

Loto pushed forward. "That's _mamita_ over there," he said, pointing.
"Her name is Lylda; she's Aura's sister."

The Banker recovered his wits. "Well, and who are you, little man?" he
asked with a smile.

"My name is Loto," the little boy answered earnestly. "That's my
father." And he pointed across the room to where the Chemist was coming
forward to join them.

CHAPTER XLI

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS

Christmas Eve in a little village of Northern New York--a white
Christmas, clear and cold. In the dark, blue-black of the sky the
glittering stars were spread thick; the brilliant moon poured down its
silver light over the whiteness of the sloping roof-tops, and upon the
ghostly white, silently drooping trees. A heaviness hung in the frosty
air--a stillness broken only by the tinkling of sleigh-bells or
sometimes by the merry laughter of the passers-by.

At the outskirts of the village, a little back from the road, a
farmhouse lay snuggled up between two huge apple-trees--an
old-fashioned, rambling farmhouse with a steeply pitched roof, piled
high now, with snow. It was brilliantly lighted this Christmas Eve, its
lower windows sending forth broad yellow beams of light over the
whiteness of the ground outside.

In one of the lower rooms of the house, before a huge, blazing log-fire,
a woman and four men sat talking. Across the room, at a table, a little
boy was looking at a picture-book by the light