Wade jumped up, electrified and jubilant.  He had gone to bed, feeling quite too despondent for so healthy a fellow.  Christmas Eve, the time of family-meetings, reminded him how lonely he was.  He had not a relative in the world, except two little nieces,—­one as tall as his knee, the other almost up to his waist; and them he had safely bestowed in a nook of New England, to gain wit and virtues as they gained inches.

“I have had a stern and lonely life,” thought Wade, as he blew out his candle last night, “and what has it profited me?”

Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—­“A brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any man’s first thirty years of life.”

But, answered or not, the question troubled Wade no more.  He shot out of bed in tip-top spirits; shouted “Merry Christmas!” at the rising disk of the sun; looked over the black ice; thrilled with the thought of a long holiday for skating; and proceeded to dress in a knowing suit of rough clothes, singing, “Ah, non giunge!” as he slid into them.

Presently, glancing from his south window, he observed several matinal smokes rising from the chimneys of a country-house a mile away, on a slope fronting the river.

“Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at last,” he thought.  “I hope he is as fine a fellow as he was ten years ago.  I hope marriage has not made him a muff, and wealth a weakling.”

Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite.  His “Merry Christmas” to Mrs. Purtett was followed up by a ravished kiss and the gift of a silver butter-knife.  The good widow did not know which to be most charmed with.  The butter-knife was genuine, shining, solid silver, with her initials, M.B.P., Martha Bilsby Purtett, given in luxuriant flourishes; but then the kiss had such a fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation!  The late Perry’s kisses, from first to last, had wanted point.  They were, as the Spanish proverb would put it, unsavory as unsalted eggs, for want of a moustache.  The widow now perceived, with mild regret, how much she had missed when she married “a man all shaven and shorn.”  Her cheek, still fair, though forty, flushed with novel delight, and she appreciated her lodger more than ever.

Wade’s salutation to Belle Purtett was more distant.  There must be a little friendly reserve between a handsome young man and a pretty young woman several grades lower in the social scale, living in the same house.  They were on the most cordial terms, however; and her gift—­of course embroidered slippers—­and his to her—­of course “The Illustrated Poets,” in Turkey morocco—­were exchanged with tender good-will on both sides.

“We shall meet on the ice, Miss Belle,” said Wade.  “It is a day of a thousand for skating.”

“Mr. Ringdove says you are a famous skater,” Belle rejoined.  “He saw you on the river yesterday evening.”