roken only by their breathing they quickly
bestowed the gifts--some in the hanging stockings at the fire-place,
others beside each bed, in chairs or on the mantel.

Then they were in the hall again, the door closed so that they could
speak. The old man took up his own candle from a stand against the wall.

"The little one is like her," he said.

"He's awful cunning and bright, but Allan is the handsomest. Never in my
born days did I see so beautiful a boy."

"But he's like the father, line for line." There was a sudden savage
roughness in the voice, a sterner set to the shaven upper lip and
straight mouth, though he still spoke low. "Like the huckstering, godless
fiddle-player that took her away from me. What a mercy of God's he'll
never see her again--she with the saved and he--what a reckoning for him
when he goes!"

"But he was not bad to let you take them."

"He boasted to me that he'd not have done it, except that she begged him
with her last breath to promise it. He said the words with great maudlin
tears raining down his face, when my own eyes were dry!"

"How good if you can leave them both in the church, preaching the word
where you preached it so many years!"

"I misdoubt the father's blood in them--at least, in the older. But it's
late. Good night, Clytie--a good Christmas to you."

"More to you, Mr. Delcher! Good night!"

CHAPTER II

AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS

His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red
carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study.
Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth.
Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp
cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted
gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly
upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands
suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily
falling eye-lids.

He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing
backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real
presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call
of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family
way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in
him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own
daughter's