ay there about her white neck.

"My wife must suffer her life to flush out in gleams of colour and
light: her cheeks must hint at a glow within, as yours do now. I will
have no hard angles, no pallor, no uncertain memory of pain in her
life: it shall be perpetual summer."

He loosened her hair, and it rolled down about the bright, tearful
face, shining in the red fire-light like a mist of tawny gold.

"I need warmth and freshness and light: my wife shall bring them to me.
She shall be no strong-willed reformer, standing alone: a sovereign
lady with kind words for the world, who gives her hand only to that man
whom she trusts, and keeps her heart and its secrets for me alone."

She paid no heed to him other than by a deepening colour; the clock,
however, grew tired of the long soliloquy, and broke in with an
asthmatic warning as to the time of night.

"There is midnight," she said. "You shall go, now, Stephen
Holmes,--quick! before your sovereign lady fades, like Cinderella, into
grayness and frozen eyes!"

When he was gone, she knelt down by her window, remembering that night
long ago,--free to sob and weep out her joy,--very sure that her Master
had not forgotten to hear even a woman's prayer, and to give her her
true work,--very sure,--never to doubt again. There was a dark, sturdy
figure pacing up and down the road, that she did not see. It was there
when the night was over, and morning began to dawn. Christmas morning!
he remembered,--it was something to him now! Never again a homeless,
solitary man! You would think the man weak, if I were to tell yon how
this word "home" had taken possession of him,--how he had planned out
work through the long night: success to come, but with his wife nearest
his heart, and the homely farm-house, and the old school-master in the
centre of the picture. Such an humble castle in the air! Christmas
morning was surely something to him. Yet, as the night passed, he went
back to the years that had been wasted, with an unavailing bitterness.
He would not turn from the truth, that, with his strength of body and
brain to command happiness and growth, his life had been a failure. I
think it was first on that night that the story of the despised
Nazarene came to him with a new meaning,--One who came to gather up
these broken fragments of lives and save them with His own. But
vaguely, though: Christmas-day as yet was to him the day when love came
into the world. He knew the mea