She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his pillow the last drop of things that must go.
She there—her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life’s Calvary of the Snows.
The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and there it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before the children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked.
She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head—one of nature’s noblest—was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of their baptism into a new life.
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.