Soule, with his gun and game-bag, had been coursing over the hills three miles back, since four o’clock.  He had bagged a squirrel or two, enough to suffice for his morning’s work, and now, his piece unloaded, came stealthily towards the place of rendezvous.  He had little hope that Stephen would help him:  he had made up his mind to go through the affair alone.  If he did it, that involved—­Pah! what was in a word?  Men died every day.  He had quite resolved:  Judith and he had talked the matter over all night.  But if Frazier were a younger man, and could fight for it!  Perhaps he was armed:  Soule’s face flashed:  he stooped and broke the trigger of his gun, and then went on with a much less heavy step.  They would be more even now.  He wanted to reach the bridge by dawn, and meet his brother.  If he refused to help him, he would send him away, and wait for Frazier alone.  About nine o’clock he might expect him.

Frazier, however, had changed his plan.  He told Starr the night before, that, as M. Soule would not breakfast with him, he had concluded to rise early, and be off by dawn.  “If there’s nothing to be done about the Miami shares, there is no use wasting time here,” he thought.  So, while Stephen Yarrow waited near the bridge, the smoke was curling out of the kitchen-chimney where the cook was making ready the cashier’s beefsteak, and the old man was crawling out of bed.  He could hear Starr’s children in the room overhead making an uproar over their stockings.  “Christmas morning, by the way!  I must take some knick-knack back to Totty.” (As if his trunk were not always filled with things for Totty, and his shirts crammed into the lid, when he came home!) “Something for mother, too,” as he pulled on his socks.  “Gloves, now, hey?  A dozen pair.  I wish I had asked Madame Soule what size she wore, last night.  Their hands are about the same size.  Mother always had a tidy little paw.  So will Totty, eh?” And so finished dressing, thinking Soule had a neat little wife, but insipid.

So Christmas morning came to all of them, the day when, a long time ago, One who had made a good happy world came back to find and save that which was lost in it.  In these few hundred years had He forgotten the way of finding?

Stephen Yarrow had fallen into an uneasy doze by the road-side.  He had done with thinking, when he said, “I’ll go with John.”  The way through life seemed to open clear, exactly the same as it had been before.  There was an end of it.  There might have been a chance, but there was none.  He drowsed off into a brutish slumber.  Something like a kiss woke him.  It was only the morning air.  A clear, sweet-breathed dawn, as we said, that seemed somehow to have caught a scent of far-off harvest-farms, in lands where it was not winter.  Warm brown clouds yonder with a glow like wine in them, the splendor of the coming day hinting of itself through.

“I must have slept,” said Yarrow, taking off his cap to shake it dry.