uiet. Nothing new was
there, nothing different. It had always been so. The night lay in a
sovereign consciousness of being more than just itself. "Do you think
that you are all just you and nothing else?" it was seen to be
compassionately asking.

"What else?" Ebenezer asked himself.

He did not face this yet. But in that hour which seemed pure essence,
with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward
Jenny's house.

* * * * *

Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where,
in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the
things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.

In the dining room she wrapped herself in the gray shawl and threw up
the two windows. New air swept in, cleansing, replacing, prevailing. Her
guests had left her early, as is the way in Old Trail Town. Then she had
had her first moments with the child alone. He had done the things that
she had not thought of his doing but had inevitably recognized: Had
delayed his bed-going, had magnified and repeated the offices of his
journey, had shown her the contents of his pockets, had repeatedly
mentioned by their first names his playmates in Idaho and shown surprise
when she asked him who they were. Mary stood now by the window conscious
of a wonderful thing: That it seemed as if he had been there always.

In the clean inrush of the air she was aware of a faint fragrance,
coming to her once and again. She looked down at her garden, lying
wrapped in white and veiled with black, like some secret being. Three
elements were slowly fashioning it, while the fourth, a soft fire within
her, answered them. The fragrance made it seem as if the turn of the
year were very near, as if its prophecy, evident once in the October
violets in her garden, were come again. But when she moved, she knew
that the fragrance came from within the room, from Ellen Bourne's
Christmas rose, blossoming on the table.... Above, her eye fell on the
picture that Jenny had brought to her on that day when she had all but
emptied the house, as if in readiness. Almost she understood now the
passionate expectation in that face, not unlike the expectation of those
who in her dream had kept saying "You."

[Illustration: "THE THREE MEN STEPPED INTO THE LAMPLIGHT"]

There was a movement in her garden and on the walk footsteps. The three
men stepped into the rectangle of lamplight--Abel, A