He put his arm around Nina.  It seemed to him that life was doing considerably better than he deserved by him, and he felt very humble and contrite.  He felt in his pocket for the square jeweler’s box that lay there.

After that they left Walter Wheeler there, to play his usual part at such times, and went upstairs.  He filled the stockings bravely, an orange in each toe, a box of candy, a toy for old time’s sake, and then the little knickknacks he had been gathering for days and hiding in his desk.  After all, there were no fewer stockings this year than last.  Instead of Jim’s there was the tiny one for Nina’s baby.  That was the way things went.  He took away, but also He gave.

He sat back in his deep chair, and looked up at the stockings, ludicrously bulging.  After all, if he believed that He gave and took away, then he must believe that Jim was where he had tried to think him, filling a joyous, active place in some boyish heaven.

After a while he got up and went to his desk, and getting pen and paper wrote carefully.

“Dearest:  You will find this in your stocking in the morning, when you get up for the early service.  And I want you to think over it in the church.  It is filled with tenderness and with anxiety.  Life is not so very long, little daughter, and it has no time to waste in anger or in bitterness.  A little work, a little sleep, a little love, and it is all over.

“Will you think of this to-day?”

He locked up the house, and went slowly up to bed.  Elizabeth found the letter the next morning.  She stood in the bleak room, with the ashes of last night’s fire still smoking, and the stockings overhead not festive in the gray light, but looking forlorn and abandoned.  Suddenly her eyes, dry and fiercely burning for so long, were wet with tears.  It was true.  It was true.  A little work, a little sleep, a little love.  Not the great love, perhaps, not the only love of a man’s life.  Not the love of yesterday, but of to-day and to-morrow.

All the fierce repression of the last weeks was gone.  She began to suffer.  She saw Dick coming home, perhaps high with hope that whatever she knew she would understand and forgive.  And she saw herself failing him, cold and shut away, not big enough nor woman enough to meet him half way.  She saw him fighting his losing battle alone, protecting David but never himself; carrying Lucy to her quiet grave; sitting alone in his office, while the village walked by and stared at the windows; she saw him, gaining harbor after storm, and finding no anchorage there.

She turned and went, half blindly, into the empty street.

She thought he was at the early service.  She did not see him, but she had once again the thing that had seemed lost forever, the warm sense of his thought of her.

He was there, in the shadowy back pew, with the grill behind it through which once insistent hands had reached to summon him.  He was there, with Lucy’s prayer-book in his hand, and none of the peace of the day in his heart.  He knelt and rose with the others.