released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was
brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as
his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping
out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down
the lawn he halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.

"Listen to that!" he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy's.

On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the
country turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the
rumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the
nearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over the
country; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer
or poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the
Southern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those American
carriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which went
back to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; to
the England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back through
robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond
this till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain.

They stood looking into each other's eyes and gathering into their
ears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all
meant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw
the whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the
atmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring
from its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fall
ahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along
the little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight of
window-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holiday