t the greeting had been "Merry Christmas," but
there could have been no mistaking what everybody meant.

XIV

At his gate in the street wall lined with snow-bowed lilacs and
mulberries, Ebenezer Rule waited in the dark for his two friends to come
back. He had found Kate Kerr in his kitchen methodically making a jar of
Christmas cookies. ("You've got to eat, if it is Christmas," she had
defended herself in a whisper.) And to her stupefaction he had
dispatched her to Mary Chavah's with her entire Christmas baking in a
basket.

"I don't believe they've got near enough for all the folks I see going,"
he explained it.

While he went within doors he had left the hobbyhorse in the snow, close
to the wall; and he came back there to wait. The street had emptied. By
now every one had gone to Mary Chavah's. Once he caught the gleam of
lanterns down the road and heard children's voices singing. For some
time he heard the singing, and after it had stopped he fancied that he
heard it. Startled, he looked up into the wide night lying serene above
the town, and not yet become vexed by the town's shadows and interrupted
by their lights. It was as if the singing came from up there. But the
night kept its way of looking steadily beyond him.

... It came to Ebenezer that the night had not always been so
unconscious of his presence. The one long ago, for example, when he had
slept beneath this wall and dreamed that he had a kingdom; those other
nights, when he had wandered abroad with his star glass. Then the night
used to be something else. It had seemed to meet him, to admit him. Now
he knew, and for a long time had known, that when he was abroad in the
night he was there, so to say, without its permission. As for men, he
could not tell when relation with them had changed, when he had begun to
think of them as among the externals; but he knew that now he ran along
the surface of them and let them go. He never met them as _Others_, as
belonging to countless equations of which he was one term, and they
playing that wonderful, near role of _Other_. Thus he had got along, as
if his own individuation were the only one that had ever occurred and as
if all the mass of mankind--and the Night and the Day--were
undifferentiated from some substance all inimical.

Then this vast egoism had heard itself expressed in the mention of
Bruce's baby--the third generation. But by the great sorcery wherewith
Nature has protected herself, this m