Nor in the life of Mary Christmas had Time been idle, though in outward semblance she bore few marks of its changes. At fifty, after nearly twenty years of traveling on foot, heavily laden and the prey of all weathers, she was singularly little worn. Her hair was still more black than gray, and her eyes, although at times they harbored an unfathomable sadness, had not lost their glow. Still she pushed her red cart up and down the coast roads--roads which now too often echoed with the snorts and puffs of vehicles akin to Mr. Wescott’s; still she arranged to reach the Wescott village in early June. Not once, indeed, did she deviate from that now long-established custom, even when the assurance of the later arrival of the four Wescotts, vacation-bound, might have tempted her to postpone her coming. Them she saw in midsummer or early fall, often making the journey by rail and by stage particularly for that purpose; but her first visit of every spring continued to occur, as it had begun, with the drifting of the petals and the drying of the roads. Those who understood her best saw in this tenaciousness an almost pathetic adherence to custom, which, as she grew older, became not only the dominating motive in her life but also the source of untold strength and comfort. Shorn and stripped by the very force of circumstances of those observances which, hallowed by centuries of reverent usage, had come down to her, she clung to the places and persons that, upon her first coming to this new land, had been most closely identified with the old. For, kind as had been this country of her adoption with its easy peace and plenty, she felt as she grew older a disquieting sense of its incompleteness and of her own strangeness within its welcoming gates. Thus it happened that when Raphael, now a prosperous American business man in a cigar store, bought and furnished by his mother’s capital, refused to answer her when she spoke to him in his native language, and when the new Scandinavian husband of little Mary laughed stupidly at the cakes which, on the days commemorating ancient festivals, she brought into his bakeshop, she longed for the drying of the familiar roads along which she had left the thoughts and memories of so many years.