when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand;
you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident."

Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter
afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.

She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.

"It is getting late," she said in nearly the same tone of quiet
warning with which she had spoken before. "There is no time to lose."

He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its
interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of
her arms, looking at her reverently.

But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the
hands that were life, the arms that were love.

She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward
over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.
Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the cat softly
on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put
out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile
over her shoulder to him:

"Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?" she asked,
with a struggling sweetness in her voice.