as past they fell in all their fury upon
Iden. Pay me that thou owest! The one only saying in the Gospel
thoroughly engrained in the hearts of men. Pay me that thou owest! This
is the message from the manger at Bethlehem of our modern Christmas.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XXI.

SO Amaryllis went up into the gaunt, cold room at the top of the house,
and bent herself seriously to drawing. There was no fireplace, and if
there had been they could not have allowed her coals; coals were dear.
It was quite an event when the horse and cart went to the wharf for
coal. There was plenty of wood for the hearth--wood grew on the
farm--but coal was money.

The March winds howled round the corner of the old thatched house, and
now and again tremendous rains blew up against the little western window
near which she had placed her table. Through the silent cold of January,
the moist cold of February, the east winds and hurricane rains of March,
Amaryllis worked on in her garret, heedless of nipped fingers and
chilled feet.

Sometimes she looked out of the window and watched Iden digging in the
garden underneath, planting his potatoes, pruning his trees and shrubs,
or farther away, yonder in the meadow, clearing out the furrows that
the water might flow better--"trenching," as he called it.

The harder it rained the harder he worked at this in the open, with a
sack about his shoulders like a cloak; the labourers were under shelter,
the master was out in the wet, hoping by guiding the water to the grass
to get a larger crop of hay in June.

Bowed under his sack, with his rotten old hat, he looked a woful figure
as the heavy shower beat on his back. But to Amaryllis he was always her
father.

Sometimes she went into the next room--the lumber-room--only lighted by
a window on a level with the floor, a window which had no glass, but
only a wire network. Sitting on the floor there, she could see him at
the stile across the road, his hands behind his back, gossiping now with
another farmer or two, now with a labourer, now with an old woman
carrying home a yoke of water from the brook.

The gossiping hurt Amaryllis even more than the work in the cold rain;
it seemed so incongruous, so out of character, so unlike the real Iden
as she knew him.

That he, with his great, broad and noble forehead, and his profile like
Shakespeare, should stand there talk, talk, talking on the smallest
hamlet topics with old women, and labour