The Professor did not show whether he felt relieved by this _denouement_. He had listened without moving; and when the young man finished speaking he hesitated a moment, then, with the same peculiar expression visible about his mouth, said he would be glad to place himself at their service; he would be with them directly; that he had not been feeling well; indeed, he only an hour ago almost fainted, and had not yet recovered when he heard the knock upon his door; but he was feeling better, and would come down immediately. The young man laughed good-naturedly as he replied,— “I am obliged to say I did not like the looks of you at first. You must have been out of your head.” The Professor waited until the last echo of the retreating footsteps died away down at the bottom of the stairs, then shut his door. “A strange thing,” he muttered; “what have I to do with Christmas? I, who have studied, studied! I had forgotten there was any time called Christmas. What is it to a scholar? Philosophy says nothing about it; and reason would teach that—ah, yes, it too is a dream, a dream within the dream called life. Then what have I to do with it? Why did I promise? I will not go. Yet my vow—twenty-four hours. I dare not trust myself alone. A funeral, did he say? I will see how it feels; yes, for I will probably need one in another day. They wanted me ‘for a corpse,’ and I said they would likely get me, and I would be glad to ‘place myself at their service.’ Ha, ha! They can bury me twice. But my vow, my vow! I will not trust myself alone. It is nothing to me; I will go.” He had been tramping again rapidly up and down the room, when he suddenly turned, took up his hat, looked around for a moment at the shadows that were still making unintelligible signs to each other, then extinguished them in darkness and slowly went down stairs. The lodgings were directly over the undertaker’s establishment. Living so secluded, speaking to none, it had never occurred to the Professor before what a grim place he had chosen for his home. But now the silver-barred coffins in the show-case were ghastly as he passed. Night had not yet yielded up her supremacy. A heavy covering of snow, that clung to every roof, tower, and spire, made the place look unreal through the gloom, like some colorless apparition of a great specter city. Close-blinded, silent and cold, without one glimmer of life, the houses faced each other down the long street. Far off, the ghostly dome and pinnacles of the cathedral reached into the sky—the empty, soundless sky—for the wind had fallen away, leaving a gray expanse that seemed to stretch through infinitude. But, though the Professor did not notice, there was a rift that divided the dreary cloud down near the horizon, and disclosed, brighter than the pale light of the coming day, a star shining in the East. And it was Christmas morning.