icicles. Gasping for breath and crunching for foothold the sidewalk
people breasted the gritty cold. Puckered with chills and goose-flesh,
the fireside people huddled and sneezed around their respective
hearths. Shivering like the ague between his cotton-flannel blankets,
Stanton's courage fairly raced the mercury in its downward course. By
noon his teeth were chattering like a mouthful of cracked ice. By
night the sob in his thirsty throat was like a lump of salt and snow.
But nothing outdoors or in, from morning till night, was half as
wretchedly cold and clammy as the rapidly congealing hot-water bottle
that slopped and gurgled between his aching shoulders.

It was just after supper when a messenger boy blurted in from the
frigid hall with a great gust of cold and a long pasteboard box and a
letter.

Frowning with perplexity Stanton's clumsy fingers finally dislodged
from the box a big, soft blanket-wrapper with an astonishingly
strange, blurry pattern of green and red against a somber background
of rusty black. With increasing amazement he picked up the
accompanying letter and scanned it hastily.

"Dear Lad," the letter began quite intimately. But it was not signed
"Cornelia". It was signed "Molly"!




II