Those winding coast roads, which led around quiet coves where herons stood in the clear, still water, past stretches of gray, wind-vexed sea and over upland pastures fragrant with bayberry, mitigated in some degree the tragedy in which Mary Christmas as the years went by had found herself an unwilling actor. It was the old, bitter tragedy of Age contending with Youth and going down before it--a tragedy older than that of Lear or of Isaac and his sons, old as life itself, and enhanced a thousandfold in its cruelty when enacted by immigrant children who willingly crush beneath their feet all that their parents have held sacred. Defeated at home, Mary Christmas took to the long familiar roads, in the courses of which during those first years she had lived over again so much of her life. Along that particularly lonely stretch of woodland she had sung of Vartan; under that great pine which afforded such a sweep of tossing blue water she had imagined that she was looking upon the Mediterranean, her homesick eyes dim with tears; in that clump of sumach, red in the September sunshine, she had fallen asleep and dreamed that avenging blood was flowing in the far city of Erzerum; in country lanes, in farmhouse kitchens, and beneath blossoming apple trees she had told to wide-eyed children her tales of saints and heroes, and of holy places. These landmarks of the woods and coast villages lent a consistency and coherence to her life as she grew older, which not even the complete emancipation of Raphael and little Mary could entirely disturb. Through her repeated visits to them and her eager reception of those sacramental elements of which they were the symbols, she kept close the past with all its beneficence. It was doubtless in an effort to strengthen this coherence of which she felt such need that, the year following Mary Wescott’s marriage and that of her own Mary, she discarded her suit and hat and returned to the gold-laced bodice and the red silk handkerchief. These she never again relinquished, in spite of the pressure at home and the fast changing modes of those complacent years.