"My maid, Celeste, has forwarded to me your letter," she wrote, "and now when I know that I must write you where I am and why I have come here, that at last I must answer your insistent question, oh, Robert!—it is very hard indeed.

"How mockingly to-night your words are ringing in my ears!

"'And so,' you said that memorable night, 'it is but right for me to tell you now, Jean, that with marriage, if you grant me that happiness, my brave and lonely little mother comes back into my home-life for all time!'

"Very handsome and very resolute you looked, but Robert, I wonder if you guessed what a queer resentful chill crept into my selfish heart at your words. Like a grim leper stalking at my side rose the thought that once more Life was ironically robbing me of its finest and sweetest. Oh, Robert, how can I write you now that I did not want your mother in my home and life, intruding upon the first happiness of my lonely life—that I wanted only you!

"I asked you to wait without seeing me again until I should write you and with Celeste's connivance I slipped away in the night, bent upon the maddest, crudest whim that ever selfish heart devised. For I came to the little village you had so often described—to Westowe—and I came—yes, I must write it all crude and narrow as it is—to appraise, to coldly analyze and dissect—your mother, to see if I deemed her worthy a place in my home and my new life with you! And out of the rain and dark, Fate's twinkling light lured me to her very door!

"For, Robert, I am here in the dear peace and quiet of this pine-scented lane, unknown, unquestioned, trusted as I surely do not deserve, lingering on day by day with this dear, brave little mother of yours, and now I know that it is I who am not worthy, that my very quest was a profanation that makes my cheeks burn with the utter shame of it. And something has stirred in my lonely heart at the sight of her that has been hushed since early childhood. So often these days I find myself repeating those wonderful words of Lowell's:

"So the leper of selfish resentment no longer crouches at my side. Instead there is something so shining and beautiful that I grow afraid. 'In many climes without avail!' And even that is I, Egypt and India and Syria and the uttermost parts of the world, so in a mad search for life I have gone and gone again and here in the heart of the pines I have found life and peace and love, the Holy Grail.

"After all, Robert, how much of life's heart-glow I have been denied until now. Those black and bitter childhood days, the under-current of resentment because the only heir to the Varian millions was not a boy, the tearless agony of the nights when first divorce and later death took my father and mother out of my life and I cried for sisters, for brothers, for cousins, for anything in God's world to give some touch of humanness to my barren life—such is my cycle of memory. I wonder if you can guess the utter desolation that comes with the knowledge that you are quite alone with never a single blood-tie to warm the ice about your heart.

"But, now, I have worked with my hands. I have scrubbed and ironed and baked, I have lived for another besides myself, I have watched the lives of two whose brave and cheerful compassion for each other bears in it the touch of holiness and I have come to know a wee soldier whose sturdiness on life's firing line, like that of your mother, has shamed me again and again. Such a wonderfully courteous little lad he is, Robert, with his hermit hut and his buried savings and his dreams of becoming a very great doctor. And some day when I can devise a way of breaking through the wall of his pride, I am going to make him what he dreams. Robert, I think the ice is melting around my heart at last. I am gaining a broader vision.

"Lady Ariel—it is so Aunt Cheerful calls me. Oh, Robert, how can I go to her and tell her why I came, how I linger here day by day hoping for courage to ask her pardon. And it has grown even harder now that I know that she would have the kind and beautiful wife of her son like Lady Ariel, that she has whimsically chosen to see in me her fanciful Lady of the Fireglow garbed wondrously in flame-colored satin! For how can I let her glimpse the cruel canker that lay in the heart of the daughter of her dreams. On the bed as I write lies a gown of 'flame-colored satin' and the Varian jewels, and this moonlit Christmas Eve when she comes from the chapel, I shall go to her as she has dreamed of me and on my knees I shall beg her forgiveness and a place in the beautiful shrine of her brave and cheerful heart.

"Oh, Robert, pray for me that I may not hurt her!"

Very thoughtfully Jean sealed the letter and directed it to Robert Loring, then she began a brisk pilgrimage about the quiet house. Holly and mistletoe and Christmas wreaths came mysteriously to light from a box beneath the Lady Ariel's bed, and soon the cottage among the pines smiled cheerfully through a Christmas flare of pine and holly. For Aunt Cheerful's Christmas interest had somehow waned after Robert's letter, and at the hermit's diffident suggestion, Lady Ariel had taken the pleasant task upon herself.

And when the deft and busy decorator had finished her work, she slipped into her cloak and went hurrying through the village toward the covered bridge. Very lonely and small the hermit's hut in the moonlight and with a catch in her throat, Jean took the rusty key from the nail and entered. Only Aunt Cheerful and Lady Ariel knew the secret of the buried savings. So to-night Jean hurriedly searched the hermit's floor for a certain creaking board, and when at last she drew forth the pitiful little canvas bag, she stuffed it full of greenbacks.

The chill silver of the winter moonlight flooded brightly through the open door, haloing the figure of the girl upon her knees in the desolate shanty and flashing full upon the ragged photograph above the table. So as Jean turned, her startled eyes rested directly upon the features of the hermit's father, and the girl stared aghast, her face white in the moonlight. For the face was the face of her nomad Uncle whose life had been irrevocably marred by the cruelty of her father. And as Jean stared, somewhere within her the ice melted for all time. Starved and eager strands of kinsmanship went flying out to twine hungrily about the gallant heart of Lord Chesterfield, and there upon her knees in the river shack, the heiress to the Varian millions fell to sobbing and praying incoherently for the love of her little cousin. And even as she prayed, faintly over the village came the echo of the Christmas hymn.

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