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.