s had failed and
there was no water in them--either for healing or for penitential
cleansing.

The fifth day after his home-coming was Christmas Eve. Late in the
afternoon, when the doctor had made his second visit and had gone away,
leaving no word of encouragement for the watchers, Tom left the house
and took the path that led up through the young orchard to the foot of
Lebanon.

He was deep within the winter-stripped forest on the mountain side,
plunging upward through the beds of dry leaves in the little hollows,
when he met Ardea. She was coming down with her arms full of holly, and
for the moment he forgot his troubles in the keen pleasure of looking at
her. It had not occurred to him sooner to think of her as other than the
girl of his boyhood days, grown somewhat, as he himself had grown. But
now he saw that she was very beautiful.

None the less, his greeting was a brotherly reproof.

"I'd like to know what you're thinking of, tramping around on the
mountain alone," he said, frowning at her.

"I have been thinking of you, most of the time, and wishing you could be
with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly.

[Illustration: "I have been wishing you could be with me."]

"I ought to row you like smoke, but when you say things like that, I
can't. Don't you know you oughtn't to go projecting around in the woods
all alone?"

"I have always done it, haven't I? And Hector was with me till a few
minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a
rabbit. Is your mother any better this afternoon?"

"Sit down," he commanded abruptly. "I want to talk to you."

She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat
down on a moss-covered rock. Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves,
and for a little while he was silent.

"You haven't told me yet how your mother is," she reminded him.

"She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close
to see whether she is breathing. The doctor says that if there isn't a
change pretty soon, she'll die."

"O Tom!"

He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows
together.

"She's been good to God all her life; what do you reckon He's letting
her die this way for?"

It was a terrible question, made more terrible by the savage hardihood
that lay behind it. Ardea could not reason with him; and she felt
intuitively that at this crisis only reason would appeal to him. Yet she