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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.