"Who's there?" repeated Miss Jerusha, sharply.
"It's only me—please let me in," answered a faint voice.
To Miss Jerusha it sounded like the voice of a child, but still suspicious of her visitor, she only called:
"What do you want?"
"Oh, please open the door—I'm so cold!" was the answer, in a faint, shivering voice that was drowned in another shriek of the storm.
Miss Jerusha was no coward; so, first arming herself with a pair of tongs, having some vague idea she might find them useful, she pulled open the door, admitting a wild drift of wind, and snow, and sleet, and, blown in with it, the small, slight figure of a child—no one else.
Miss Jerusha closed the door, folded her arms, and looked at her unexpected visitor. Little Fly, too, so far recovered from her terror as to lift her woolly head and favor the new-comer with an open mouth and eyes astare.
It was a boy of some thirteen or fourteen years of age, wretchedly clad, but so white with the drifting snow that it was impossible to tell what he wore. His face was thin, pinched, and purple with the cold, his fingers red and benumbed, his teeth chattering either with fear or cold.
As Miss Jerusha continued to stare at him in severest silence, he lifted a pair of large, dark, melancholy eyes wistfully, pleadingly, to her hard, grim face.
"Well," said the spinster, at last, drawing a deep breath, and surveying him from head to foot—"well, young man, what do you want, if a body may ask?"