With a sense of demoralization it was dawning on him that he might not find her, or Carmencita, in time for Christmas, and he must find them.  A great hunger for the day to be to him what it seemed to be to others possessed him feverishly, and with eyes that saw what they had never seen before he watched, as he walked, the faces of the people who passed, and in his heart crept childish longing to buy something for somebody, something that was wanted very much, as these people seemed to be doing.  He had made out the checks he usually sent to certain institutions and certain parties at this season of the year for his head clerk to mail.  By this time they had been received, but with them had gone no word of greeting or good will; his card alone had been inclosed.  A few orders had been left at various stores, but with them went no Christmas spirit.  He wondered how it would feel to buy a thing that could make one’s face look as Carmencita’s had looked when she made her purchase of the night before.  It was a locket she had bought—­a gold locket.

In a whispered confidence while in the car she had told him it was for her mother’s picture.  The picture used to be in her father’s watch, but the watch had to be sold when he was sick, after her mother’s death, and he had missed the touch of the picture so.  She knew, for often she had seen him holding his watch in his hand, open at the back, where the picture lay, with his fingers on it, and sometimes he would kiss it when he thought she was out of the room.  After the watch was sold the picture had been folded up in one of her mother’s handkerchiefs, and her father kept it in the pocket of his coat; but once it had slipped out of the handkerchief, and once through a hole in the pocket, and they thought it was lost.  Her father hadn’t slept any that night.  And now he could sleep with the locket around his neck.  She would put it on a ribbon.  Wasn’t it grand?  And Carmencita’s hands had clasped ecstatically.

Up and down the streets he went, looking, looking, looking.  The district in which he found himself was one of the poorest in the city, but the shops were crowded with buyers, and, though the goods for sale were cheap and common and of a quality that at other times would have repelled, to-day they interested.  Carmencita might be among the shoppers.  She had said she had a few things to get for some children—­penny things—­and she was possibly out, notwithstanding the snow which now was falling thick and fast.

Some time after his usual lunch-hour he remembered he must have something to eat; and, going into a dingy-looking restaurant, he sat down at a table, the only one which had a vacant seat at it, and ordered coffee and oysters.  His table companion was a half-grown boy with chapped hands and a thin white face; but his eyes were clear and happy, and the piece of pie he was eating was being swallowed in huge hunks.  It was his sole order, a piece of awful-looking pie.  As the coffee and oysters were brought him Van Landing saw the boy look at them hungrily and then turn his eyes away.