About 7 minutes to read aloud.

On the night before Christmas, when the frost had turned the village hard and silver, a girl called Nell woke to a green coat passing beneath her window.

She knew Father Christmas wore red. Everyone knew that. But the man crossing the square below was tall as a lamppost and dressed head to foot in green, the colour of holly before the berries come, and he carried no sack that she could see. He walked the way her grandfather used to walk, unhurried, as though the night belonged to him and there was no reason to rush through it.

Nell watched him stop at the baker's door. He did not knock. He crouched, set something small on the step, and moved on. By the time he reached the blacksmith's, three doors along, she had her boots on over her nightgown and was down the stairs before she could think better of it.

The cold outside caught her chest like a hand closing round it. She kept to the shadow of the wall, the way her brother had taught her for hide-and-seek along the lane, and watched the green coat move from door to door with no hurry in it at all.

At the blacksmith's he left a stone, grey and ordinary, the kind you would kick without noticing. At the seamstress's, a length of ribbon faded almost to nothing. At the inn, a single key, tarnished black. At the widow Pryce's, nothing but an empty jar, set carefully upright on the step as though it mattered.

Nell frowned at each one from her hiding place. These were not presents. A stone was not a present, nor a rusted key. She had expected oranges at least, or a wooden top, something a child might unwrap and hold up to the fire to admire. Instead the tall man was leaving what looked like rubbish at people's doors, one house at a time, and walking on before anyone woke to see him do it.

She followed him as far as the well at the end of the lane, where he finally stopped and turned, and she understood then that he had known she was there the whole way.

"You're cold," he said. It was not a question.

Nell straightened up from behind the wall, since there seemed little use in hiding any longer. "Why are you leaving stones and jars? Where are the presents?"

The tall man looked back down the lane at the row of dark houses, each with its small thing now sitting on the step. "The stone belongs to the blacksmith," he said. "He threw it into his own forge forty years ago, the night his father died, because he was young and angry and needed somewhere to put it. I have only brought it back."

"And the jar?"

"Widow Pryce kept her sugar in it for thirty Christmases, until it cracked last spring and she threw the pieces out with the ash. She has been baking without one since, and telling herself it does not matter." He nodded towards the ribbon, pale under the frost on the seamstress's step. "That belonged to her sister, who is at sea and cannot send anything this year. I found it a long way from here, and it seemed the right night to bring it home."

Nell thought about this while her feet went numb inside her boots. "So you don't bring presents. You bring back what people lost."

"Sometimes that is the same thing," the tall man said. "Sometimes it is better."

He turned as if to go, and Nell, having come this far, could not quite let him. "What have you got for me, then?"

The tall man reached into the deep green of his coat, the way she had watched him do at six doors already, and this time he held his closed hand out to her directly, which he had done for no one else that night. When he opened it, there was a single brass button, worn smooth, with a thread of green still caught in its shank.

Nell knew it at once. It was off her grandfather's coat, the one that had gone into the ground with him three winters back, the one she had cried over losing a button from and never told a soul, because it seemed a foolish thing to cry over.

"I didn't lose that," she said. "It was buried."

"Nothing very small is ever entirely lost," the tall man said. "It only takes the right night to come back."

He was already moving on, down towards the last houses at the edge of the village, his green coat folding into the dark hedgerow so that within a few steps Nell could not have said exactly where he was. She stood at the well with the button warm now in her fist and did not follow any further, because some things a person keeps rather than chases.

She walked home slowly, the frost creaking under her boots, and said nothing to her mother about where she had been, only that she had gone to the well and back, and found something on the way.