'What if he should be sitting there still,' thought
she, 'all alone in the dark!' She scrambled out of bed and crept down.
"Meantime the others had made the room below so dark, that only the
face and white hair of the old man could be dimly discerned in the
shadowy crowd. For he had filled his own mind with shadows, which we
Shadows wanted to draw out of him. Those shadows are very different
from us, your majesty knows. He was thinking of all the disappointments
he had had in life, and of all the ingratitude he had met with. And he
thought far more of the good he had done, than the good others had got.
'After all I have done for them,' said he, with a sigh of bitterness,
'not one of them cares a straw for me. My own children will be glad
when I am gone!'--At that instant he lifted up his eyes and saw,
standing close by the door, a tiny figure in a long night-gown. The
door behind her was shut. It was my little friend, who had crept in
noiselessly. A pang of icy fear shot to the old man's heart, but it
melted away as fast, for we made a lane through us for a single ray
from the fire to fall on the face of the little sprite; and he thought
it was a child of his own that had died when just the age of her
child-niece, who now stood looking for her grandfather among the
Shadows. He thought she had come out of her grave in the cold darkness
to ask why her father was sitting alone on Christmas-day.
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