"
With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
mistletoe.
"Tell me the story of this!" she pleaded as though she demanded a
right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
he now saw, would give her pain.
"Happily the story is far away from us," he said, as though he were
half inclined to grant her request.
"If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!"
He held back a long time: "You who are so safe in good, why know
evil?"
"Frederick," she cried, "I shall have to insist upon your telling me
this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
truth!"
He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
the narrative of the historian:
"Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
Palestine became Holy Land.
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