There was a wicker-basket that Lois had left by the fire, piled up with bits of cloth and leather out of which she was manufacturing Christmas gifts; a pair of great woollen socks, which one of the sisters had told him privately Lois meant for him, lying on top.  As with all of her people, Christmas was the great day of the year to her.  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 her 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.  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,—­famished his heart.  As it approached in the slow-coming winter, the days growing shorter, and the nights longer and more solitary, so Margaret 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, his soul should not be balked longer of its rightful food.  For I fear that even now Stephen Holmes thought of his own need and his own hunger.

He watched Lois knitting and patching her poor little gifts, with a vague feeling that every stitch made the time a moment shorter until he should be free, with his life in his hand again.  She left him at last, sorrowfully enough, but he made her go:  he fancied the close air of the hospital was hurting her, seeing at night the strange shadow growing on her face.  I do not think he ever said to her that he knew all she had done for him; but no dog or woman that Stephen Holmes loved could look into his eyes and doubt that love.  Sad, masterful eyes, such as are seen but once or twice in a lifetime:  no woman but would wish, like Lois, for such eyes to be near her when she came to die, for her to remember the world’s love in.  She came hobbling back every day to see him after she had gone, and would stay to make his soup, telling him, child-like, how many days it was until Christmas.  He knew that, as well as she, waiting through the cold, slow hours, in his solitary room.  He thought sometimes she had some eager petition to offer him, when she stood watching him wistfully, twisting her hands together; but she always smothered it with a sigh, and, tying her little woollen cap, went away, walking more slowly, he thought, every day.