The light of some burning driftwood and dried sea-weed filled the low roof and was reflected back to a cot, on which a woman lay with a living child beside her.  Something dread and ineffable was conveyed by that stiffened form.  The Jew, familiar with misery and all its indications, caught the preacher in his arms.

“Levin Purnell,” he said, “thy Christmas gift has come.  Bear up!  There is no more persecution for thee.  She is dead!”

The outcast preacher looked once, wildly, on the woman’s face, and with a cry pressed his hands to his heart.  The Jew laid him down upon a miserable pallet, and for a few moments watched him steadily.  Neither sound nor motion revealed the presence of the cold spark of life.  The husband’s heart was broken.

“Poor wretch!” exclaimed the Jew.  “Mismated couple; in death as obstinate as in life.  Lie there together, befriended in the closing hour by the Jew of Chincoteague, a present—­to-morrow’s Christmas—­for thy neighbors of this Christian island!”

He stirred the fire.  Death had no terrors for him, who had seen it by land and sea, in brawls and shipwrecks, by hunger and by scurvy.  He laid the bodies side by side, and warmed the infant at the fire.  Looking up from the living child’s face, he caught the sparkle of the crucifix he had discovered, where it stood in the narrow window-sill.  There were gems of various colors in it, and they reflected the firelight lustrously, like a slender chandelier, or, as the Jew remembered in the version of the Evangels, like the gifts those bearded wise men, of whom he might resemble one, brought to the manger of the infant Christ—­gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.  Struck by the conceit, he looked again at the baby’s face—­the baby but a few days or weeks old—­and he felt, in spite of himself, a softness and pity.

“It might be true,” he muttered, “that a Jewish man, a tricked and unsuspecting husband of a menial, like her who has perished with this preacher, did behold a new-born baby in the manger of an inn, eighteen hundred and forty years ago.”

He looked again at the cross.  In the relief of the night against the window-pane its jewels shone like the only living things in the hovel.  A figure was extended upon this cross, and every nail was a precious stone; the crown of thorns was all diamonds.

“It might be true,” he said again, “that on a cross-beam like that, the manger baby perished for some audacity—­as I might be put to death if I mocked the usages of a whole nation, as this preacher has done.”

The cross, an object as high as one of the window-panes, and suffused with the exuding dyes of its jewels, took now a dewy lustre, as if weeping precious gum and amber.  The Jew felt an instant’s sense of superstition, which he dashed away, and placing the child, already sleeping, before the fire, awakened rapacity led him to hunt the hovel over.  He found nothing but a few religious books, and amongst them a leather-covered Testament, which he opened and read with insensibility—­passing on, at length, to interest, then to fascination, at last to rage and defiance—­the opening chapters and the close of the story of Jesus.