Are you hungry, too?"

"A little," owned the smaller sister. "I shared my apple with Anna Betts. She's the little girl from down on the flats. She didn't have any lunch at all today. Her father broke his leg yesterday, and they're awfully poor."

"You darling child!" It was Phyllis who said it, and there were tears in her voice.

"It's just awful!" burst forth Melissa.

But Rosalie suddenly broke forth into a joyous little squeal.

"Why, it's hot, Phyllie; the register's really hot! I didn't know it could get hot like that. It's only been kind of warm before."

"Yes," said Melissa, whirling around, "this room is warm for the first time this winter. You must have made a wonderful fire, Phyllis. Maybe the house is burning up."

"It is getting hot, isn't it?" said Phyllis. "Isn't it wonderful? Perhaps I ought to go down and shut something. It will all burn out."

"I guess you ought. Hurry, and I'll watch the street and see if Mrs. Barkus is coming and warn you. You don't want her to find you down cellar at her old furnace."

"No," gurgled Phyllis, "let her think she made her own fire and it has lasted. Let her see how nice it is to have the house warm for once, even though she did go out all day to save coal on us." Phyllis hurried down cellar and back again as fast as she could without meeting any menacing landladies.

"There!" she said triumphantly, closing the hall door. "I shut something down below and turned a little handle in the back of the pipe that opened something. I guess it's all right. Anyway it stopped roaring. And I put some more coal on, too, so she can't put the fire out tonight anymore unless she pours water on it. I guess I did everything I ought to have done."

"Well, it's good to get warm anyway," said Melissa, who had come over to the register and was warming her feet.

"Yes," said Rosalie smiling. "It's nice, isn't it?"

"Now," said Melissa after she had basked in the comfortable heat for a moment, "our next need is food. What are we going to do about it? Shall we make a raid on the Barkus larder and really be put in jail, or would it be better to starve to death?"

Rosalie giggled, but it was easy to see that her laughter was near to tears.

"Seriously, Phyllis, what is there in the house? Mother will be hungry, too, when she comes. We ought to have whatever there is ready, oughtn't we?"

Melissa had a way on occasion of rising to a situation that she had been leaving to her younger sister as if she had been working hard and Phyllis doing nothing, but Phyllis was too genuinely troubled by the facts of the case to mind just now.

"Liss, there isn't a thing but the large half of a loaf of bread! Honestly! Oh, and a little tea. There isn't even hot water unless I go down and boil it on that furnace."

"Mother will have a quarter for the gas meter when she comes, won't she?" said Melissa thoughtfully.

"Maybe. But she hadn't but a dollar and five cents in her purse when she went away. If she couldn't get the money cashed today, she might have had to spend that for something for Father."

There was a silence in the room for a moment, and then Rosalie looked up with a sacrificial expression.

"I've got a quarter. It's the one that Mother gave me when I won that contest in school. I was saving it to get her a birthday present. But I guess perhaps she'd rather have tea ready when she gets home."

"I'm afraid she would, Rosy Posy," said Phyllis, stooping to kiss the sunny hair and hide her own tendency to tears. "Suppose you lend it to us on interest, a cent a month, how's that? I promise to pay as soon as my ship comes in."

"Oh, Phyl, how funny!" said Rosalie. "I don't want any interest." And she pattered over to the bureau drawer where she kept all her small belongings and rooted out the quarter from underneath her most precious things.

"It seems wicked to use it," said Phyllis as she held the quarter in her hand as if it were a jewel.

"Don't feel that way, sister," said the little girl.