Uneasy enough he looked now as Clytie unloaded him of the bundles and bulky toys.  In a silence broken only by their breathing they quickly bestowed the gifts—­some in the hanging stockings at the fire-place, others beside each bed, in chairs or on the mantel.

Then they were in the hall again, the door closed so that they could speak.  The old man took up his own candle from a stand against the wall.

“The little one is like her,” he said.

“He’s awful cunning and bright, but Allan is the handsomest.  Never in my born days did I see so beautiful a boy.”

“But he’s like the father, line for line.”  There was a sudden savage roughness in the voice, a sterner set to the shaven upper lip and straight mouth, though he still spoke low.  “Like the huckstering, godless fiddle-player that took her away from me.  What a mercy of God’s he’ll never see her again—­she with the saved and he—­what a reckoning for him when he goes!”

“But he was not bad to let you take them.”

“He boasted to me that he’d not have done it, except that she begged him with her last breath to promise it.  He said the words with great maudlin tears raining down his face, when my own eyes were dry!”

“How good if you can leave them both in the church, preaching the word where you preached it so many years!”

“I misdoubt the father’s blood in them—­at least, in the older.  But it’s late.  Good night, Clytie—­a good Christmas to you.”

“More to you, Mr. Delcher!  Good night!”

CHAPTER II

AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS

His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study.  Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth.  Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers.  A big, white-breasted gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily falling eye-lids.

He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real presence.  Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call of the Lord against his father’s express command that he follow the family way and become a prosperous manufacturer.  Truly there had been revolt in him.  Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own daughter’s revolt.