She stood a little way off, her great brown eyes flashing with tears. It was so strange a joy to find herself cared for, when she had believed she was old and hard: the very idle jesting made her youth and happiness real to her. Holmes saw that with his quick tact. He flung playfully a crimson shawl that lay there about her white neck. "My wife must suffer her life to flush out in gleams of color 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 color; 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 you 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 schoolmaster 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 meaning of that. So he watched with an eagerness new to him the day breaking. He could see Margaret's window, and a dim light in it: she would be awake, praying for him, no doubt. He pondered on that.