here I don't come
in. He has to leave me at Saint Andrew's because he hasn't any home. It
must be just fine to have a home that isn't a school,--a sort of cosy
little place, with cushioned chairs, and curtains, and a fire that you can
see, and a kitchen where you can roast nuts and apples and smell
gingerbread baking, and a big dog that would be your very own. But you
can't have a home like that when you have a priest uncle like mine."

"No, you can't," agreed Dan, his thoughts turning to Aunt Winnie and her
blue teapot, and the little rooms that, despite all the pinch and poverty,
she had made home.

"And Christmas," went on Freddy, both young speakers being quite oblivious
of the big stranger who had seated himself on a camp stool in the shelter
of the projecting cabin, and, with folded arms resting on the deck rail,
was apparently studying the distant horizon,--"I'd like to have one real
right Christmas before I get too big for it."

"Seems to me you have a pretty good time as it is," remarked Dan: "new
skates and sled, and five dollars pocket money. There wasn't a fellow at
the school of your age had any more."

"That's so," said Freddy; "but they went _home_. A fellow doesn't want
pocket money when he goes home. Dick Fenton had only sixty cents; I lent
him fifteen more to get a card-case for his mother. But he had Christmas
all right, you bet: a tree that went to the ceiling (he helped to cut it
down himself); all the house 'woodsy' with wreaths and berries and
fires,--real fires where you could pop corn and roast apples. He lives in
the country, you see, where money doesn't count; for you can't buy a real
Christmas; it has to be homemade," said Freddy, with a little sigh. "So
I'll never have one, I know."

Then the great gong sounded again to announce supper; and both boys
bounded away to find the rest of their crowd, leaving the big stranger
still seated in the gathering darkness, looking out to sea. As the boyish
footsteps died into silence, he bowed his head upon his hands, and his
breast heaved with a long, shuddering breath as if some dull, slumbering
pain had wakened into life again. Then, in fierce self-mastery, he rose,
stretched his tall form to its full height, and, ascending to the upper
deck, began to pace its dimming length with the stern, swift tread of one
whose life is a restless, joyless march through a desert land.

Meanwhile Brother Bart and his boys had begun to feel the roll of the sea,