:

"I have loved a great man. For me, monsieur, it is enough. Their souls
unite in victory!"

THE RED CANDLE

It was so cold that the world seemed as stiff and stark as a poet's
hell. A little moon was frozen against a pallid sky. The old dark houses
with their towers and gables wore the rigid look of iron edifices. The
saint over the church door at the corner had an icicle on his nose.
Even the street lights shone faint and benumbed through clouded glass.

Ostrander, with his blood like ice within his veins, yearned for a
Scriptural purgatory with red fire and flame. To be warm would be
heaven. It was a wise old Dante who had made hell cold!

As he crossed the threshold of his filthy tenement he felt for the first
time a sense of its shelter. Within its walls there was something that
approached warmth, and in his room at the top there was a bed with a
blanket.

Making his way toward the bed and its promise of comfort, he was stopped
on the second stairway by a voice which came out of the dark.

"Mr. Tony, you didn't see our tree."

Peering down, he answered the voice: "I was going up to get warm."

"Milly said to tell you that we had a fire."

"A real fire, Pussy? I didn't know that there was one in the world."

He came down again to the first floor. Pussy was waiting--a freckled dot
of a child tied up in a man's coat.

The fire was in a small round stove. On top of the stove something was
boiling. The room was neat but bare, the stove, a table, and three
chairs its only furnishing. In a room beyond were two beds covered with
patchwork quilts.

On the table was a tree. It was a Christmas tree--just a branch of pine
and some cheap spangly things. The mother of the children sewed all day
and late into the night. She had worked a little longer each night for a
month that the children might have the tree.

There was no light in the room but that of a small and smoky lamp.

Milly spoke of it. "We ought to have candles."

Ostrander, shrugged close to the stove, with his hands out to its heat,
knew that they ought to have electric lights, colored ones, a hundred
perhaps, and a tree that touched the stars!

But he said: "When I go out I'll bring you a red candle--a long one--and
we'll put it on the shelf over the table."

Milly, who was resting her tired young body in a big rocker with the
baby in her arms, asked: "Can we put it in a bottle or stand it in a
cup? We haven't any candlestick."

"We