Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in
her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into
his arms--_his_; no other's--never while life lasted to be
another's even in thought or in desire.

Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of
many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could
gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms
and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As
his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their
mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little
phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe_!"

Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of
mistletoe swung from the chandelier.

Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards
know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as
the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them
most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow
down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon
the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the
green spot of verdure under life's dark skies--the undying bough into
which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his