As she grew older, she always held among the confused and crowded impressions of her childhood the clearest memory of that winter day; of the bright silence of the woods, and of herself going softly through the trees, across a frozen swamp with the brown marsh grass protruding above its smooth, white hummocks, over wide stretches of pasture, and stopping here and there to draw from beneath her red cape the wonder-working box and to present it before the suffering eyes of some stricken animal or tired wayfarer. She heard, too, as the years came and went, the sound of her own childish voice, clear and high in the still air, reciting the words with which Mary Christmas’ mellowed, ringing tones had endowed the pilgrim and which she supplemented by others of her own:-- “‘Art thou ill, my brother? Look upon the hand of the holy Saint Gregory, which the Lord hath sent unto thee.’” “‘Death, flee away from this poor creature, in the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts!’” It was from that day, she knew, that the love of words came to suffuse her life with its radiance, tuning her ears to cadences of sound, charming her eyes with the ecstasy of light and color, delighting her imagination by opening gates into far fields. Had the lips of countless thousands in their age-long life endowed them with music? Had the visions, evoked by them centuries ago, lingered within their syllables? From that day as the penitent pilgrim in the still, white wood she became a worshipper at their shrine, repeating to herself again and again the sentences and phrases which Mary Christmas had first endeared to her and which had stayed to take up their own places in her heart:-- “‘The Lord be merciful unto thee.’” “‘In the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts.’” Single words, too, began to hold a charm for her, words quite free from their context, but never alone because of the pictures they called forth. _Silent, holy, high, garden, old_--what magic lay within each one of them! _Old_ was, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas loved _old_. Upon her lips it opened the gates of ancient cities, led one over desolate, hoary plains and hot, sand-swept deserts, carried one to remote gardens within gray, crumbling walls, brought before one’s eyes a time-worn, weary land. Cynthia came to cherish those three letters as one cherishes a rare jewel which in changing lights gives forth changing colors. In fact, she grew so ardent in her love for them that she felt personally aggrieved when John at the breakfast table, his father being absent, cried in a sudden declaration of independence:-- “I hate this nasty old porridge! I won’t eat it!” VII A PILLAR OF FIRE