“Merciful powers! Cis!” cried Rodney, honestly disgusted. “You talking philosophy, or psychology, or some other rotten, cold-blooded analysis! You, glowing, red-haired, my Holly? That high-browed crowd you’ve gone in with at Beaconhite have cold packed you!”
Cis smiled faintly. “I’m no colder than I ever was—”
“Except to me!” Rodney interrupted her. “Don’t tell me that I don’t remember—”
“Except to you,” Cis interrupted in her turn, her color heightened. “I have grown up, and we are no longer possible chums. It happens often enough that people grow apart, even when they’re married. When it has happened to two people who are free, there can be, there should be, no talk of marriage between them. We must say good-bye, Rodney, as you came to say it.”
“As you told me to come to say it; I didn’t mean to say it,” Rodney pulled on a chain from inside his breast, and held up to Cis her ruby holly ring. “I wear it, but take it back, Cis!” he begged.
“Oh, the poor, lovely ring!” Cis cried. “I will never take it back. Oh, Rodney, we had not planned for the true Christmas when I wore that! Give the ruby to be set in a chalice, or sell it, and send the money to take care of some helpless baby who may never know that Our Lord was a baby! Let it make a trifling reparation for us both.”
Rodney stared, but this suggestion seemed to convince him that between him and Cis stretched unbridgeable distances.
“Well, you have got it bad!” he said slowly, not so much irreverently as in a puzzled way, expressing himself in the vernacular of his custom.
“Don’t you think it’s natural to want to pay back?” Cis suggested. “If the Church were not true, she could not be so beautiful, and you do ‘have it bad,’ as you say, when you love anything that is wholly true and profoundly beautiful. Rodney, truly you don’t begin to know! I wish you would—at least begin to know! Did you ever read about those poor animals which have been shut down in mines, how they act when they come up into the sunshine, into green fields again? Quite mad with the warmth, and brightness, and pasturage? I’m like that. I went along, didn’t know what I was missing, but now I know what I have! Will you promise me, Rodney, solemnly promise me, now, to-day when we part, that you will do your best to learn what your birthright is which you threw away?”
Rodney Moore looked long and mutely at Cis, frowning, biting his lip; she had silenced his pleas for his personal desires. She waited for his answer.