the Child was with us yet, if we could only see.  Jem was always his mother’s spokesman, and put the meaning of Christmas into words:  she never talked of such things.  Yet they always watched her face, when they spoke of them,—­watched it now, and looked, as she did, into the little room beyond the kitchen where they sat, their eyes growing still and brighter.  There might have been a tinge of the savage or the Frenchman in Martha Yarrow’s nature, she had so strong a propensity to make real, apparent to the senses, what few ideas she had, even her religion.  A good skill to do it, too.  The recess out of the kitchen was only a small closet, but, with the aid of a softly tinted curtain or two, and the nebulous light of a concealed lamp, she had contrived to give it an air of distance and reserve.  Within were green wreaths hung over the whitewashed walls, and an altar-shaped little white table, covered with heaps of crimson leaves and bright berries, such as grow in the snow; only a few flowers, but enough to fill the air with fragrance; the children’s Christmas gifts, and wax-lights burning before a picture, the child Jesus, looking down on them with a smile as glad as their own.  A thoroughly real person to the boys, this Christ for childhood; for she built the little altar before this picture on all their holidays:  something in the woman herself needing the story of the Stable and the Child.  If she were doing a healthier work on the souls of that morbid Jem and glutton Tom than could a thousand after-sermons, she did not know it:  never guessed, either, when they absorbed day by day hardly enough the force of her tough-muscled endurance and wholesome laugh, that she prepared the way of the Lord and made His paths straight.  Yet what matter who knew?

But to go on with our story.  There were times—­once or twice to-night, for instance—­when she ceased doing even her unconscious work.  Assuredly, somewhere back in her life, something had gone amiss with this silly, helpful creature, and left a taint on her brain.  The hearty, pretty smile would go suddenly from her face, something foreign looking out of it, instead, as if a pestilent thought had got into her soul; she would rise uneasily, going to the window, looking out, her forehead leaning on the glass, her body twitching weakly.  One would think from her face she saw some work in the world which God had forgotten.  What could it matter to her?  Whatever hurt her, it was the one word which her garrulous lips never hinted.  Once to-night she spoke more plainly than Jem had ever known her to do in all his life.  It was after the children had gone to bed, which they did, shouting and singing, and playing circus-riders over the pillows, their mother leaning her elbows on the foot-board, laughing, in the mean time.  Jem got up, after the others were asleep, and stole after her, in his little flannel drawers, back to the kitchen.  By the window again, as he had feared, the woollen sock which she was knitting