For Christmas day the weather turned mild again. There would be a family dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some sandwiches, so that he needn’t come back for lunch. He kept a few bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms. Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to Spain. It wasn’t foresight — Prohibition was then unthinkable — but a lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.

As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming back from Mass. “Are you still going to the old house, Professor?” she asked reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur collar and her stiff black hat.

“Oh, yes Augusta, but it’s not the same. I miss you. There are never any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won’t you come in sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them looking smart.”

Augusta laughed. “You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else said the things you do to your classes, I’d be scandalized. But I always tell people you don’t mean half you say.”

“And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?”

“Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting things about the Church,” she said gravely.

“But, really, Augusta, I don’t think I ever do.”

“Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you ought to be careful.”

“It doesn’t matter. What they think today, they’ll forget tomorrow.” He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very unlike the step he had when he was full of something. “That reminds me: I’ve been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory — is that the Magnificat?”

Augusta stopped and looked at him. “Why, Professor! Did you receive no religious instruction at all?”

“How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic church in our town in Kansas, and I guess my father forgot his religion.”

“That happens, in mixed marriages.” Augusta spoke meaningly.

“Ah, yes, I suppose so. But tell me, what is the Magnificat, then?”

“The Magnificat begins, My soul doth magnify the Lord; you must know that.”

“But I thought the Magnificat was about the Virgin?”

“Oh, no, Professor! The Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat.”

St. Peter became intensely interested. “Oh, she did?”

Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to rebuke his ignorance too sharply. “Why, yes, just as soon as the angel had announced to her that she would be the mother of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat. I always think of you as knowing everything, Doctor St. Peter!”

“And you’re always finding out how little I know. Well, you don’t give me away. You are very discreet.”

Their ways parted, and both went on more cheerful than when they met. The Professor climbed to his study feeling quite as though Augusta had been there and brightened it up for him. (Surely she had said that the Blessed Virgin sat down and composed the Magnificat!) Augusta had been with them often in the holiday season, back in the years when holidays were holidays indeed. He had grown to like the reminders of herself that she left in his workroom — especially the toilettes upon the figures. Sometimes she made those terrible women entirely plausible!

In the early years, no matter how hard he was working, he had always felt the sense of holiday, of a special warmth and fragrance in the air, steal up to his study from the house below. When he was writing his best, he was conscious of pretty little girls in fresh dresses — of flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby sitting-room — of his wife’s good looks and good taste — even of a better dinner than usual under preparation downstairs. All the while he had been working so fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the domestic drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux, — working her chronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes, — alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories.

On this Christmas morning, with that sense of the past in his mind, the Professor went mechanically to work, and the morning disappeared. Before he knew it was passing, the bells from Augusta’s church across the park rang out and told him it was gone. He pushed back his papers and arranged his writing-table for lunch.

He had been working hard, he judged, because he was so hungry. He peered with interest into the basket his wife had given him — a wicker bag, it was, really, that he had once bought full of strawberries at Gibraltar. Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California grapes, and two shapely, long-necked russet pears. That would do very well; and Lillian had thoughtfully put in one of her best dinner napkins, knowing he hated ugly linen. From the chest he took out a round of cheese, and a bottle of his wine, and began to polish a sherry glass.

While he was enjoying his lunch, he was thinking of certain holidays he had spent alone in Paris, when he was living at Versailles, with the Thieraults, as tutor to their boys. There was one All Souls’ Day when he had gone into Paris by an early train and had a magnificent breakfast on the Rue de Vaugirard — not at Foyot’s, he hadn’t money enough in those days to put his nose inside the place. After breakfast he went out to walk in the soft rainfall. The sky was of such an intense silvery grey that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue Sufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The shop windows were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey, accented by black crevices, and weatherworn bosses white as wood-ash. All at once, from somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and woman, pushing a hand-cart, came into the empty street. The cart was full of pink dahlias, all exactly the same colour. The young man was fair and slight, with a pale face; the woman carried a baby. Both they and the heels of their barrow were splashed with mud. They must have come from a good way in the country, and were a weary, anxious-looking pair. They stopped at a corner before the Pantheon and fearfully scanned the bleak, silvery, deserted streets. The man went into a bakery, and his wife began to spread out the flowers, which were done up in large bouquets with fresh green chestnut-leaves. Young St. Peter approached and asked the price.

“Deux francs cinquante, Monsieur,” she said with a kind of desperate courage.

He took a bunch and handed her a five-franc note. She had no change. Her husband, watching from the bakery, came running across with a loaf of bread under his arm.

“Deux francs cinquante,” she called to him as he came up. He put his hand into his pocket and fumbled.

“Deux francs cinquante,” she repeated with painful tension. The price agreed upon had probably been a franc or a franc fifty. The man counted out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration. St. Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn’t occurred to him to get more; but all his life he had regretted that he didn’t buy two bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again found dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with bright chestnut-leaves.

A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he could give his bouquet, when a pathetic procession filed past him through the rain. T............