The rector had offended Christmas by interceding for Easter, and by pooh-poohing his fiery zeal against the meetings in Widow Evans' cottage, and he turned into the village inn but seldom now. Christmas felt this to the very soul; but he was too proud to speak of it, or to yield an inch to his clergyman. It was reported, moreover, that the ale was badly brewed, or was kept in sour casks: a fact that might possibly have had something to do with the rector's fewer visits, and with their brevity when he came. Christmas made no effort to learn any tidings of his daughter; but the neighbours took care he should hear them. She had taken a place as upper nurse in the family of the rector's cousin, who lived in the market-town he attended; and now and then he fancied he saw her threading her way through the busy streets on a market-day. A year or two after she left home, he heard she had married Widow Evans' son, a poor, delicate young man, assistant only in the draper's shop where he had served his apprenticeship. Christmas cursed him bitterly in his heart; though he never uttered his name, or Easter's, with his lips. The letters Easter wrote to him he returned unopened; but none the less bitter was his resentment that she should marry without his consent. She was his daughter still, though he vowed she was not. Presently came the news that a grandson was born to him. His own grandson! He heard it on market-day, and the farmers who were about him, buying and selling their corn, watched him inquisitively to see how he took the news. Not a change came over his hard, grim face; yet suddenly in his mind rose up the memory of that sunny Easter Sunday, when the bells were ringing joyously in the old church-tower for the resurrection of the Lord, and some one brought to him his first-born child. Another memory followed close upon it—the evening shadows of the same day closing round him as he knelt beside his dying wife, and heard her whisper in her last faint tones, "I leave my baby to you, dear Christmas!" All his lonely way home that night these two visions haunted him. Still six months later further tidings reached his ears. Two or three of his oldest and most faithful guests, who yet lingered of an evening on the old hearth, were talking together, seated within the old screen, which concealed him from their sight, though they had a shrewd guess that he was within hearing. "Widow Evans' son is dead," said one, "and he's left poor Easter a widow, with her babe!" "What's she going to do?" asked another of the party. "They say she's bound to come home to Widow Evans," was the answer. "She's ailing, is Widow Evans, and growing simple; she wants somebody to fend for her. And who so natural as Easter, poor lass? They were praying for her at the meeting last Sunday, and praying hard for 'him,' as the Lord 'ud soften his heart. You know who! It'll take a deal o' softening, I'm thinking." "Ay! Ay!" agreed all the company.