could fight for
it! Perhaps he was armed: Soule's face flashed: he stooped and broke the
trigger of his gun, and then went on with a much less heavy step. They
would be more even now. He wanted to reach the bridge by dawn, and meet
his brother. If he refused to help him, he would send him away, and wait
for Frazier alone. About nine o'clock he might expect him.

Frazier, however, had changed his plan. He told Starr the night before,
that, as M. Soule would not breakfast with him, he had concluded to rise
early, and be off by dawn. "If there's nothing to be done about the
Miami shares, there is no use wasting time here," he thought. So, while
Stephen Yarrow waited near the bridge, the smoke was curling out of the
kitchen-chimney where the cook was making ready the cashier's beefsteak,
and the old man was crawling out of bed. He could hear Starr's children
in the room overhead making an uproar over their stockings. "Christmas
morning, by the way! I must take some knick-knack back to Totty." (As if
his trunk were not always filled with things for Totty, and his shirts
crammed into the lid, when he came home!) "Something for mother, too,"
as he pulled on his socks. "Gloves, now, hey? A dozen pair. I wish I had
asked Madame Soule what size she wore, last night. Their hands are about
the same size. Mother always had a tidy little paw. So will Totty, eh?"
And so finished dressing, thinking Soule had a neat little wife, but
insipid.

So Christmas morning came to all of them, the day when, a long time ago,
One who had made a good happy world came back to find and save that
which was lost in it. In these few hundred years had He forgotten the
way of finding?

Stephen Yarrow had fallen into an uneasy doze by the road-side. He had
done with thinking, when he said, "I'll go with John." The way through
life seemed to open clear, exactly the same as it had been before. There
was an end of it. There might have been a chance, but there was none. He
drowsed off into a brutish slumber. Something like a kiss woke him. It
was only the morning air. A clear, sweet-breathed dawn, as we said, that
seemed somehow to have caught a scent of far-off harvest-farms, in lands
where it was not winter. Warm brown clouds yonder with a glow like wine
in them, the splendor of the coming day hinting of itself through.

"I must have slept," said Yarrow, taking off his cap to shake it dry.

There were a thousand shining points on the dingy fur. He rubbed