rd him
through.

"She took refuge with him," he said violently, when the Bishop had
finished. "She knew what hate there was between us, yet she took refuge
with him."

"The question is," said the Bishop mildly, "why she should have been
driven to refuge. A gentle lady, a faithful wife--"

"Deus!" The young _seigneur_ clapped a fist on the table. "You know well
the reason. A barren woman!"

"She had borne you a daughter."

But Charles was far gone in rage and out of hand. The Bishop took his
offended ears to bed, and left him to sit alone by the dying fire, with
bitterness for company.

Came into the courtyard at midnight the Christmas singers from the town;
the blacksmith rolling a great bass, the crockery-seller who sang
falsetto, and a fool of the village who had slept overnight in a manger
on the holy eve a year before and had brought from it, not wit, but a
voice from Heaven. A miracle of miracles.

The men-at-arms in the courtyard stood back to give them space. They
sang with eyes upturned, with full-throated vigour, albeit a bit
warily, with an anxious glance now and then toward those windows beyond
which the young lord sulked by the fire.

"The Light of Light Divine,
True Brightness undefiled.
He bears for us the shame of sin,
A holy, spotless Child."

They sang to the frosty air.

When neither money nor burning fagot was flung from the window they
watched, they took their departure, relieved if unrewarded.

In former years the lady of the Castle had thrown them alms. But times
had changed. Now the gentle lady was gone, and the _seigneur_ sulked in
the hall.

With the dawn Charles the Fair took himself to bed. And to him,
pattering barefoot along stone floors, came Clotilde, the child of his
disappointment.

"Are you asleep?"

One arm under his head, he looked at her without answer.

"It is the anniversary of the birth of our Lord," she ventured. "Today
He is born. I thought--" She put out a small, very cold hand. But he
turned his head

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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