She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising
out of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, but
exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and
made a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them
under the sleeves.
Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.
Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look
of the rejected.
So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
For years her first words to him on this day had been the world's best
greeting:
"A Merry Christmas!"
She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and
instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out
of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future
would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so gone
out of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She
struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly
about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his
face.
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