“You do not seem to find your purer self altogether perfect?” she demanded.  “I think the pale skin hurts your artistic eye, or the frozen eyes,—­which is it?”

“They have thawed into brilliant fire,—­something looks at me half-yielding and half-defiant,—­you know that, you vain child!  But, Margaret, nothing can atone”—­

He stopped.

“That is right, Stephen.  Remorse grows maudlin when it goes into words,” laughing again at his astounded look.

He took her hand,—­a dewy, healthy hand,—­the very touch of it meant action and life.

“What if I say, then,” he said, earnestly, “that I do not find my angel perfect, be the fault mine or hers?  The child Margaret, with her sudden tears and laughter and angry heats, is gone,—­I killed her, I think,—­gone long ago.  I will not take in place of her this worn, pale ghost, who wears clothes as chilly as if she came from the dead, and stands alone, as ghosts do.”

She stood a little way off, her great brown eyes flashing with tears.  It was so strange a joy to find herself cared for, when she had believed she was old and hard:  the very idle jesting made her youth and happiness real to her.  Holmes saw that with his quick tact.  He flung playfully a crimson shawl that lay there about her white neck.

“My wife must suffer her life to flush out in gleams of color and light:  her cheeks must hint at a glow within, as yours do now.  I will have no hard angles, no pallor, no uncertain memory of pain in her life:  it shall be perpetual summer.”

He loosened her hair, and it rolled down about the bright, tearful face, shining in the red fire-light like a mist of tawny gold.

“I need warmth and freshness and light:  my wife shall bring them to me.  She shall be no strong-willed reformer, standing alone:  a sovereign lady with kind words for the world, who gives her hand only to that man whom she trusts, and keeps her heart and its secrets for me alone.”

She paid no heed to him other than by a deepening color; the clock, however, grew tired of the long soliloquy, and broke in with an asthmatic warning as to the time of night.

“There is midnight,” she said.  “You shall go, now, Stephen Holmes,—­quick! before your sovereign lady fades, like Cinderella, into grayness and frozen eyes!”

When he was gone, she knelt down by her window, remembering that night long ago,—­free to sob and weep out her joy,—­very sure that her Master had not forgotten to hear even a woman’s prayer, and to give her her true work,—­very sure,—­never to doubt again.  There was a dark, sturdy figure pacing up and down the road, that she did not see.  It was there when the night was over and morning began to dawn.  Christmas morning! he remembered,—­it was something to him now!  Never again a homeless, solitary man!  You would think the man weak, if I were to tell you how this word “home” had taken possession of him,—­how he had