“We are trying,” explained Jim, “to raise a special Christmas offering for missions. Along with the rest of her Christmas giving, the church is asked to give to those who have never learned what Christmas is.” There was a slight pause. “Could anything,” Jim asked, “be more acceptable to Him in whose name our festival is kept?” “The original meaning of Christmas has been overlaid in a good many minds,” commented Christy, briefly. “To their loss,” said Jim, “and to the bitter loss of many besides.” He rose from his seat and began to pace back and forth over Christy’s thick carpet. But he was weak; he soon came back to his old place. “I have walked,” he said musingly, “the swarming streets of heathen cities, I have gone into heathen homes, I have stood face to face with weary, heavy-laden, heathen souls, and I have been taught what Darkness is. But then, thank God, I have time and again seen the Star of Bethlehem break in the black sky and stand still over some place where the Christ was born, and I know, yes, I know, the brightness of its rising!” There was another silence. Again Jim was the first to speak. “No doubt,” he said, “you give a number of Christmas presents.” “I don’t think of them in September,” said Christy. “That is fortunate,” responded Jim, tranquilly. “It will give you more leisure to think of this betimes.” He looked at his watch and said that he must go. They walked together to the corner where he took the car, and then Christy hurried back to his work. “That man will never go to China next September,” he muttered to himself, as he rang up the elevator. “It will be another Celestial Kingdom for which he will start, unless the signs are wrong.” For the rest of the morning, Mr. Morton was not so undivided in his attention to business as was customary with him. Many times his mind wandered to the face that was like, and so unlike, the face of his old college mate. It was aged. It was lined. It was tired. “But you could trust it,” Christy concluded, “to the uttermost.” “Jim Perry,” he said, facing at last the crucial idea which he had sought to evade, “has got much out of life. What am I getting?” The roar of the city came in at the open windows. Christy did not hear. “If I should die to-night—that is too trite a supposition. If I should have softening of the brain to-night, or advancing paralysis, what satisfaction would there be to which I could hold fast, as I sat with my face to the wall while life passed me by?” The breeze fluttered the papers on his desk. “If my plans stopped now, nothing would be left from the failure. They need the future in order to amount to anything. If Jim Perry never gets back to China, why”—he leaned his head on his hand and thought came slowly—“he has lived for an object and attained it as he went along.” Christy was still thinking of the look in Jim’s eyes and the sound of his voice when footfalls along the corridor foretold an interruption.