midnight
` Aye , sir , aye , sir , yo 're abeawt reet -- we ` st not trouble her , sir . ' He carried his boy home , Sandy raining questions in a tumult of excitement . Then when the child was put to bed he sat on in his lonely study , stirred to his sensitive depths by the thought of Dora 's long waiting and sad sudden joy -- by the realisation of the Christmas crowds and merriment -- by the sharp memory of his own dead . Towards midnight , when all was still , he opened the locked drawer which held for him the few things which symbolised and summed up his past -- a portrait of Lucy , by the river under the trees , taken by a travelling photographer , not more than six weeks before her death -- a little collection of pictures of Sandy from babyhood onwards -- Louie 's breviary -- his father 's dying letter -- a book which had belonged to Ancrum , his vanished friend . But though he took thence his wife 's picture , communing awhile , in a passion of yearning , with its weary plaintive eyes , he did not allow himself to sink for long into the languor of memory and grief . He knew the perils of his own nature , and there was in him a stern sense of the difficulty of living aright , and the awfulness of the claim made by God and man on the strength and will of the individual . It seemed to him that he had been ` taught of God ' through natural affection , through repentance , through sorrow , through the constant energies of the intellect .