Holmes could not but smile,
looking at them. Poor Lois!--Christmas would be here soon, then?
And sitting by the covered fire, he went back to Christmases
gone, the thought of all others that brought Margret nearest and
warmest to him: since he was a boy they had been together on that
day. With his hand over his eyes, he sat quiet by the fire until
morning. He heard some boy going by in the gray dawn call to
another that they would have holiday on Christmas week. It was
coming, he thought, rousing himself,-- but never as it had been:
that could never be again. Yet it was strange how this thought
of Christmas took hold of him, after this,-- famished his heart.
As it approached in the slow-coming winter, the days growing
shorter, and the nights longer and more solitary, so Margret
became more real to him,--not rejected and lost, but as the wife
she might have been, with the simple, passionate love she gave
him once. The thought grew intolerable to him; yet there was not
a homely pleasure of those years gone, when the old school-master
kept high holiday on Christmas, that he did not recall and linger
over with a boyish yearning, now that these things were over
forever. He chafed under his weakness. If the day would but
come when he could go out and conquer his fate, as a man ought to
do! On Christmas eve he would put an end to these torturing
taunts, be done with them, let the sacrifice be what it might.
For I fear that even now Stephen Holmes thought of his own need
and his own hunger.
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