Gault, unheeded and unheeding, hurried through the press, crossed Market Street, and plunged into the region beyond. There were crowds here too, and lights and laughter, brilliant windows that sent gushes of raw radiance across the sidewalks, and Christmas shoppers as busy as those on the other side of the city's great dividing artery. Even in the old street, among the brooding palaces, there was a faint show of life. In one there were lights in the second-story windows. Against the ground-glass panels in the massive front door of another the circular forms of two wreaths were outlined. The iron gate of its bulky neighbor grated grudgingly to give egress to an expressman carrying parcels. In the smaller streets down which he had so often passed, the windows were alight and, according to the gracious custom of the time, the blinds were undrawn. Sometimes he had a glimpse of darkling interiors, where, alone and glittering frostily in its fairy trimmings, the tree stood, not to be revealed until the morrow. But in many homes they were keeping Christmas eve. The rifled branches, sparkling even in their despoilment, were a-wink with candles. The children clustered about, some flushed and excited, others sitting solemnly among their presents, examining them with grave and pouting intentness. There were mothers with sleeping babies in their arms, and fathers explaining the mechanism of wondrous, uncomprehended toys. They were the city's humblest and least prosperous homes; yet, hidden by the veil of night, a man, rich in all they lacked, stood staring in at them, wistful, heart-hungry, and envious. He turned the last corner, and the small shape of the colonel's old house defined itself among the surrounding buildings. In the kindly dark it looked as it used to, and he approached slowly, letting his gaze wander over its façade and dwell on the homely bulge of the bay-window, whence, as of old, light broke in cracks and splinters on the small panes of glass on either side of the front door, on the steps, and the porch that used to sag down to one side, and the gate between its squat brick posts. There was no one on the street, but a block away he could hear the measured tread of Policeman O'Hara on his customary beat from the saloon at the corner to the saloon in the middle of the block. Beyond this there was nothing but the whispering fall of the rain and its warm breath. Then, as he drew nearer, he passed into an atmosphere of delicate, illusive sweetness that told him the jasmine-tree by the gate was in flower. It recalled vividly other times when he had come--but not to stand outside this way, a stranger in the rain.