"How old are you?" she asked abruptly. "Twice your age--" "Nonsense--" "Not in years, perhaps--but I have lived--oh, how I have lived--!" He straightened his shoulders and ran his fingers through his hair. She had a sudden vision of what he might be if shorn of his poverty. There was something debonair--finished--an almost youthful grace--a hint of manner-- She sighed. "Oh, the waste of it!" "Of what?" She flamed. "Of you!" Then she went in and shut the door. He stood uncertainly in the hall. Then once again he faced the cold. Around the corner was a shop where he would buy the red candle. The ten cents which he would pay was to have gone for his breakfast. He had sacrificed his supper that he might not go hungry on Christmas morning. He had planned a brace of rolls and a bottle of milk. It had seemed to him that he could face a lean night with the promise of these. There were no red candles in the shop. There were white ones, but a red candle was a red candle--with a special look of Christmas cheer. He would have no other. The turn of a second corner brought him to the great square. Usually he avoided it. The blaze of gold on the west side was the club. A row of motors lined the curb. There was Baxter's limousine and Fenton's French car. He knew them all. He remembered when his own French car had overshadowed Fenton's Ford. There were wreaths to-night in the club windows, and when Sands opened the doors there was a mass of poinsettia against the hall mirror. How warm it looked with all that gold and red! In the basement was the grill. It was a night when one might order something heavy and hot. A planked steak--with deviled oysters at the start and a salad at the end. And now another motor-car was poking its nose against the curb. And Whiting climbed out, a bear in a big fur coat. Whiting's car was a closed one. And it would stay there for an hour. Ostrander knew the habits of the man. From the office to the club, and from the club--home. Whiting was methodical to a minute. At seven sharp the doors would open and let him out. The clock on the post-office tower showed six! There was a policeman on the east corner, beating his arms against the cold. Ostrander did not beat his arms. He cowered frozenly in the shadow of a big building until the policeman passed on. Then he darted across the street and into Whiting's car! Whiting, coming out in forty minutes, found his car gone. Sands, the door man, said that he had noticed nothing. The policeman on the corner had not noticed. "I usually stay longer," Whiting said, "but to-night I wanted to get home. I have a lot of things for the kids." "Were the things in your car?" the policeman asked. "Yes. Toys and all that--" Ostrander, with his hand on the wheel, his feet on the brakes, slipped through the crowded streets unchallenged. It had been easy to unlock the car. He had learned many things in these later years.