r than the silent, stern man who had no hope in that day that
was coming.

He learned to watch even for poor Lois coming up the corridor every
day,--being the only tie that bound the solitary man to the inner world
of love and warmth. The deformed little body was quite alive with
Christmas now, and brought its glow with her, in her weak way.
Different from the others, he saw with a curious interest. The day was
more real to her than to them. Not because, only, the care she had of
everybody, and everybody had of her seemed to reach its culmination of
kindly thought for the Christmas time; not because, as she sat talking
slowly, stopping for breath, her great fear seemed to be that she would
not have gifts enough to go round; but deeper than that,--the day was
real to her. As if it were actually true that the Master in whom she
believed was freshly born into the world once a year, to waken all that
was genial and noble and pure in the turbid, worn-out hearts; as if new
honour and pride and love did flash into the realms below heaven with
the breaking of Christmas morn. It was a beautiful faith; he almost
wished it were his. A beautiful faith! it gave a meaning to the old
custom of gifts and kind words. LOVE coming into the world!--the idea
pleased his artistic taste, being simple and sublime. Lois used to
tell him, while she feebly tried to set his room in order, of all her
plans,--of how Sam Polston was to be married on New-Year's,--but most
of all of the Christmas coming out at the old school-master's: how the
old house had been scrubbed from top to bottom, was fairly glowing with
shining paint and hot fires,--how Margret and her mother worked, in
terror lest the old man should find out how poor and bare it was,--how
he and Joel had some secret enterprise on foot at the far end of the
plantation out in the swamp, and were gone nearly all day.

She ceased coming at last. One of the sisters went out to see her, and
told him she was too weak to walk, but meant to be better soon,--quite
well by the holidays. He wished the poor thing had told him what she
wanted of him,--wished it anxiously, with a dull presentiment of evil.

The days went by, cold and slow. He watched grimly the preparations
the hospital physician was silently making in his case, for fever,
inflammation.

"I must be strong enough to go out cured on Christmas eve," he said to
him one day, coolly.

The old doctor glanced up shrewdly. He was a