Now that they were alone they gathered close about the fire, while the day without grew gray and colder,—­Margaret in her old place by her father’s knee.  Some dim instinct had troubled the old man all day; it did now:  whenever Margaret spoke, he listened eagerly, and forgot to answer sometimes, he was so lost in thought.  At last he put his hand on her head, and whispered, “What ails my little girl?” And then his little girl sobbed and cried, as she had been ready to do all day, and kissed his trembling hand, and went and hid on her mother’s neck, and left Stephen to say everything for her.  And I think you and I had better come away.  Are not these things written on the fairest page of Stephen Holmes’s remembrance?

It was quite dark before they had done talking,—­quite dark; the wood-fire had charred down into a great bed of crimson; the tea stood till it grew cold, and no one drank it.  The old man got up at last, and Holmes led him to the library, where he smoked every evening.  He held Maggie, as he called her, in his arms a long time, and wrung Holmes’s hand.  “God bless you, Stephen!” he said,—­“this is a very happy Christmas-day to me.”  And yet, sitting alone, the tears ran over his wrinkled face as he smoked; and when his pipe went out, he did not know it, but sat motionless.  Mrs. Howth, fairly confounded by the shock, went upstairs, and stayed there a long time.  When she came down, the old lady’s blue eyes were tenderer, if that were possible, and her face very pale.  She went into the library and asked her husband if she didn’t prophesy this two years ago, and he said she did, and after a while asked her if she remembered the barbecue-night at Judge Clapp’s thirty years ago.  She blushed at that, and then went up and kissed him.  She had heard Joel’s horse clattering up to the kitchen-door, so concluded she would go out and scold him.  Under the circumstances it would be a relief.

If Mrs. Howth’s nerves had been weak, she might have supposed that free-born serving-man seized with sudden insanity, from the sight that met her, going into the kitchen.  His dinner, set on the dresser, was flung contemptuously on the ashes; a horrible cloud of burning grease rushed from a dirty pint-pot on the table, and before this Joel was capering and snorting like some red-headed Hottentot before his fetich, occasionally sticking his fingers into the nauseous stuff, and snuffing it up as if it were roses.  He was a church-member:  he could not be drunk?  At the sight of her, he tried to regain the austere dignity usual to him when women were concerned, but lapsed into an occasional giggle, which spoiled the effect.

“Where have you been,” she inquired, severely, “scouring the country like a heathen on this blessed day?  And what is that you have burning?  You’re disgracing the house, and strangers in it.”

Joel’s good-humor was proof against even this.

“I’ve scoured to some purpose, then.  Dun’t tell the mester:  it’ll muddle his brains t’-night.  Wait till mornin’.  Squire More’ll be down hisself t’ ’xplain.”