have wrung this love out of your heart?  If it was easy to do, did it need to wring with it every sparkle of pleasure and grace out of your life?  Your very hair is gathered out of your sight:  you feared to remember how my hand had touched it?  Your dress is stingy and hard; your step, your eyes, your mouth under rule.  So hard it was to force yourself into an old worn-out woman!  Oh, Margaret!  Margaret!”

She moaned under her breath.

“I notice trifles, child!  Yonder, in that corner, used to stand the desk where I helped you with your Latin.  How you hated it!  Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“It always stood there:  it is gone now.  Outside of the gate there was that elm I planted, and you promised to water while I was gone.  It is cut down now by the roots.”

“I had it done, Stephen.”

“I know.  Do you know why?  Because you love me:  because you do not dare to think of me, you dare not trust yourself to look at the tree that I had planted.”

She started up with a cry, and stood there in the old way, her fingers catching at each other.

“It is cruel,—­let me go!”

“It is not cruel.”—­He came up closer to her.—­“You think you do not love me, and see what I have made you!  Look at the torpor of this face,—­the dead, frozen eyes!  It is a ‘nightmare, death in life,’ Good God, to think that I have done this!  To think of the countless days of agony, the nights, the years of solitude that have brought her to this,—­little Margaret!”

He paced the floor, slowly.  She sat down on a low stool, leaning her head on her hands.  The little figure, the bent head, the quivering chin brought up her childhood to him.  She used to sit so when he had tormented her, waiting to be coaxed back to love and smiles again.  The hard man’s eyes filled with tears, as he thought of it.  He watched the deep, tearless sobs that shook her breast:  he had wounded her to death,—­his bonny Margaret!  She was like a dead thing now:  what need to torture her longer?  Let him be manly and go out to his solitary life, taking the remembrance of what he had done with him for company.  He rose uncertainly,—­then came to her:  was that the way to leave her?

“I am going, Margaret,” he whispered, “but let me tell you a story before I go,—­a Christmas story, say.  It will not touch you,—­it is too late to hope for that,—­but it is right that you should hear it.”

She looked up wearily.

“As you will, Stephen.”

Whatever impulse drove the man to speak words that he knew were useless made him stand back from her, as though she were something he was unfit to touch:  the words dragged from him slowly.

“I had a curious dream to-night, Margaret,—­a waking dream:  only a clear vision of what had been once.  Do you remember—­the old time?”

What disconnected rambling was this?  Yet the girl understood it, looked into the low fire with sad, listening eyes.