The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 7

many minutes after four," she said,
with no other tone than that of quiet warning. "I marked the minutes in
the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to bed,
so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights are
even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not be any
twilight. The children said they would not be at home until after dark,
but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They have threatened to

catch us this year in one way or another, and you know they must not
do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmas with all its
old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries."
He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:
"I heard you playing."
He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under
his brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for
she held her face averted.
The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater
constraint in her voice when it was next heard:
"I had to play; you need not have listened."
"I had to listen; you played loud--"
"I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown
other sounds," she admitted.
"What other sounds?" His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it
was a frank thrust into the unknown.
"Discords--possibly."
"What discords?" His thrust became deeper.
She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across
her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish.
But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray
hidden trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished,
radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a blaze
of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the advancing
Figure of Joy.
It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted in

the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--that
drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the
self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near
losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as through a
crevice of the closed gates:
"I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep
grave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and it is
worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of it is
to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--an Incident.
She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a briefer time, for a
greater time; but all along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him--an
Incident."
He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened.
"Were those the discords?" he asked gently.
She did not reply.
He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised
his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of
magazines on top of his desk.
"Here is a work," he said, "not written by a German or by any other
man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole
purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the
life of any woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for a
briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, beneath
everything else, he is to her--an Incident."
He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his
eyes.
"That did not trouble me," he said tenderly. "Those were not discords to
me."
Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no

comment.
His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to
whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he
turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself
from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:
"Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year
now I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at
this work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred
before in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied upon you
and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And this
apparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last. Now you
come in