“The sun sets--you remember how many minutes after four,” she said, with no other tone than that of quiet warning. “I marked the minutes in the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone to bed, so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilights are even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will not be any twilight. The children said they would not be at home until after dark, but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They have threatened to catch us this year in one way or another, and you know they must not do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmas with all its old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries.” He did not reply at once and then not relevantly: “I heard you playing.” He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under his brows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for she held her face averted. The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greater constraint in her voice when it was next heard: “I had to play; you need not have listened.” “I had to listen; you played loud--” “I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drown other sounds,” she admitted. “What other sounds?” His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: it was a frank thrust into the unknown. “Discords--possibly.” “What discords?” His thrust became deeper. She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed across her lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish. But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hidden trouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished, radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before a blaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon the advancing Figure of Joy. It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted in the harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--that drove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained the self-control which under his unexpected attack she had come near losing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as through a crevice of the closed gates: “I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deep grave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and it is worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of it is to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--an Incident. She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, at bottom, she is to him--an Incident.” He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened. “Were those the discords?” he asked gently. She did not reply. He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raised his arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack of magazines on top of his desk.