he
resolve was, it did not still the gnawing hunger in his heart that
night, which every trifle made more fresh and strong.

There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled up with
bits of cloth and leather out of which she was manufacturing Christmas
gifts; a pair of great woollen socks, which one of the sisters had told
him privately Lois meant for him, lying on top. As with all of her
people, Christmas was the great day of the year to her. Holmes could not
but smile, looking at them. Poor Lois!--Christmas would be here soon,
then? And sitting by the covered fire, he went back to Christmases gone,
the thought of all others that brought her nearest and warmest to him:
since he was a boy they had been together on that day. With his hand
over his eyes he sat quiet by the fire until morning. He heard some boy
going by in the gray dawn call to another that they would have holiday
on Christmas. It was coming, he thought, rousing himself,--but never
as it had been: that could never be again. Yet it was strange how this
thought of Christmas took hold of him,--famished his heart. As it
approached in the slow-coming winter, the days growing shorter, and
the nights longer and more solitary, so Margaret became more real to
him,--not rejected and lost, but as the wife she might have been,
with the simple passionate love she gave him once. The thought grew
intolerable to him; yet there was not a homely pleasure of those years
gone, when the old school-master kept high holiday on Christmas, that he
did not recall and linger over with a boyish yearning, now that these
things were over forever. He chafed under his weakness. If the day would
but come when he could go out and conquer his fate, as a man ought to
do! On Christmas eve he would put an end to these torturing taunts, his
soul should not be balked longer of its rightful food. For I fear that
even now Stephen Holmes thought of his own need and his own hunger.

He watched Lois knitting and patching her poor little gifts, with a
vague feeling that every stitch made the time a moment shorter until he
should be free, with his life in his hand again. She left him at last,
sorrowfully enough, but he made her go: he fancied the close air of the
hospital was hurting her, seeing at night the strange shadow growing on
her face. I do not think he ever said to her that he knew all she had
done for him; but no dog or woman that Stephen Holmes loved could look
into his eyes