“How quiet it is!” he said, as they stopped to leave him.  It was,—­a breathless quiet; the great streets of the town behind them were shrouded in snow; the hills, the moors, the prairie swept off into the skyless dark, a gray and motionless sea lit by a low watery moon.  “The very earth listens,” he said.

“Listens for what?” said the literal old Doctor.

“I think it listens always,” said Vandyke, his eye on fire.  “For its King—­that shall be.  Not as He came before.  It has not long to wait now:  the New Year is not far off.”

“I’ve no faith in folding your hands, waiting for it; nor have you either, Charley,” growled Knowles.  “There’s an infernal lot of work to be done before it comes, I fancy.  Here, let me light my cigar.”

Holmes bade them good-night, laughing, and struck into the by-road through the hills.  He shook hands with Vandyke before he went,—­a thing he scarce ever did with anybody.  Knowles noticed it, and, after he was out of hearing, mumbled out some sarcasm at “a minister of the gospel consorting with a cold, silent scoundrel like that!” Vandyke listened to his scolding in his usual lazy way, and they went back into town.

The road Holmes took was rutted deep with wagon-wheels, not easily travelled; he walked slowly therefore, being weak, stopping now and then to gather strength.  He had not counted the hours until this day, to be balked now by a little loss of blood.  The moon was nearly down before he reached the Cloughton hills:  he turned there into a narrow path which he remembered well.  Now and then he saw the mark of a little shoe in the snow,—­looking down at it with a hot panting in his veins and a strange flash in his eye, as he walked on steadily.

There was a turn in the path at the top of the hill, a sunken wall, with a broad stone from which the wind had blown the snow.  This was the place.  He sat down on the stone, resting.  Just there she had stood, clutching her little fingers behind her, when he came up and threw back her hood to look in her face:  how pale and worn it was, even then!  He had not looked at her to-night:  he would not, if he had been dying, with those men standing there.  He stood alone in the world with this little Margaret.  How those men had carped, and criticized her, chattered of the duties of her soul!  Why, it was his, it was his own, softer and fresher.  There was not a glance with which they followed the weak little body in its poor dress that he had not seen, and savagely resented.  They measured her strength? counted how long the bones and blood would last in their House of Refuge?  There was not a morsel of her flesh that was not pure and holy in his eyes.  His Margaret?  He chafed with an intolerable fever to make her his, but for one instant, as she had been once.  Now, when it was too late.  For he went back over every word he had spoken that night, forcing himself to go through with it,—­every cold, poisoned