Finally, as the months dragged themselves wearily into years, she found in Father Wescott an outlet for all her pent-up hostility and for her growing resentment toward those governmental heads who were willing to watch and wait while ships were sunk, and disaster, confusion, and death stalked from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf. He not only shared the resentment of Mary Christmas; he fed it with his own indignant protests. If _his_ party were in Washington, he told her, things would be different! Mary Christmas knew nothing of parties, but her worshipful gaze, which the years had not dimmed, told him as plainly as words that in her opinion the country had made one incomprehensible error in judgment when it had overlooked him as leader of its destinies. And although Father Wescott’s native modesty did not allow him for a moment to share her opinion, he did echo the sputterings of his automobile as he told his town and county what he thought of the Administration! But Father Wescott and Mary Christmas waited yet more months before the country righted itself in their estimation--months during which Father Wescott forgot that his business was law and Mary Christmas that hers was trade, during which Roger and John, the one in the Law School at Cambridge, the other at the foot of the ladder in a Boston firm, studied reluctantly, all the while conscious that in spite of themselves they were marking time. In the early spring of 1917, impelled by the certainty that watchful waiting was at last at an end and by the bitter, awful knowledge, which she until now had been unwilling to admit to herself, that no avenging spirit would ever quicken her son, Mary Christmas escaped to the country while the frost was still in the roads and before the first arbutus, blooming in the cold moss of some woodland rock, touched the misty air with its perfect fragrance. The last three years had left indelible marks upon her in the thinness of her face and in the lines now irretrievably set about her mouth, in the haunting depths of her eyes and the sagging of her shoulders. They had marked her spirit, too, though that flickered on, choked and smothered, it is true, but wanting only draught and fuel to flame again.