how Sam Polston was to be married on New-Year’s,—­but most of all of the Christmas coming out at the old schoolmaster’s:  how the old house had been scrubbed from top to bottom, was fairly glowing with shining paint and hot fires,—­how Margaret and her mother worked, in terror lest the old man should find out how poor and bare it was,—­how he and Joel had some secret enterprise on foot at the far end of the plantation out in the swamp, and were gone nearly all day.

She ceased coming at last.  One of the sisters went out to see her, and told him she was too weak to walk, but meant to be better soon,—­quite well by the holidays.  He wished the poor thing had told him what she wanted of him,—­wished it anxiously, with a dull presentiment of evil.

The days went by, cold and slow.  He watched grimly the preparations the hospital physician was silently making in his case, for fever, inflammation.

“I must be strong enough to go out cured on Christmas eve,” he said to him one day, coolly.

The old doctor glanced up shrewdly.  He was an old Alsatian, very plain-spoken.

“You say so?” he mumbled.  “Chut!  Then you will go.  There are some—­bull-dog men.  They do what they please,—­they never die unless they choose, begar!  We know them in our practice, Herr Holmes!”

Holmes laughed.  Some acumen there, he thought, in medicine or mind:  as for himself, it was true enough; whatever success he had gained in life had been by no flush of enthusiasm or hope; a dogged persistence of “holding on,” rather.

Christmas eve came at last; bright, still, frosty.  “Whatever he had to do, let it be done quickly “; but not till the set hour came.  So he laid his watch on the table beside him, waiting until it should mark the time he had chosen:  the ruling passion of self-control as strong in this turn of life’s tide as it would be in its ebb, at the last.  The old doctor found him alone in the dreary room, coming in with the frosty breath of the eager street about him.  A grim, chilling sight enough, as solitary and impenetrable as the Sphinx.  He did not like such faces in this genial and gracious time, so hurried over his examination.  The eye was cool, the pulse steady, the man’s body, battered though it was, strong in its steely composure. “Ja wohl!—­ja wohl!” he went on chuffily, summing up:  latent fever,—­the very lips were blue, dry as husks; “he would go,—­oui?—­then go!”—­with a chuckle.  “All right, glueck zu!” And so shuffled out latent fever?  Doubtless, yet hardly from broken bones, the doctor thought,—­with no suspicion of the subtile, intolerable passion smouldering in every drop of this man’s phlegmatic blood.