confessed. It isn't fair for you to
withhold your confidence when we've given ours."

Mary shook her head. "I've had my lesson," she declared. "You'll never
have the chance to laugh twice, and this one is such a sky-scraper it
would astonish you."

When she spoke, she was thinking of that moment on the stair, under the
amber window, when through the music she heard the king's call, and was
first awakened to the knowledge that a high destiny awaited her. What it
was to be was still unrevealed to her, but of the voice and the vision
she had no doubt. Whatever it was she was sure it would be higher and
greater than anything any one she knew aspired to. Yet somehow, sitting
there in the friendly shadows, with the firelight shining on the earnest
manly face opposite, she did not care so much about a Joan of Arc career
as she had. It would be glorious, of course, but it might be lonesome.
People on pedestals were shut off from dear delightful intimacies like
this.

And then those lines began running through her head that she had not
been able to get rid of, since the morning she read them in the
magazine:

"For if he come not by the road, and come not by the hill,
And come not by the far seaway--"

She wished that she was certain that she could add that last part of the
line, "_Yet come he surely will!_" Just then, to have one strong true
face bending towards hers in the firelight, with a devotion all for her,
seemed worth a lifetime of public plaudits, and having one's name handed
down to posterity on monoliths and statues.

"For if he come not by the road, and come not by the hill,
And come not by the far seaway--"

"Yes, it certainly would be lonesome," she decided. She would miss the
best that earth holds for a home-loving, hero-worshipping woman.

CHAPTER VIII

CHRISTMAS DAY AT EUGENIA'S

"Although this is only the twenty-fourth of December, my Christmas has
already begun," wrote Mary in her diary next day; "for this morning when
I looked out of the window everything was white with snow. It has been
so long since I have seen such a sight, all the roofs and chimney tops
a-glisten, that I could hardly keep away from the window long enough to
dress.

"Phil stayed quite late last night. Just as he was leaving, Mrs. Boyd
and Miss Lucy came home, and of course we had to stay up a little while
longer to meet them. By the time Joyce had turned the davenport in the
studio into a bed fo