“Stay blinded and bewildered there,” he said, “until the hour comes when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident.” Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room. She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under. “It is getting late,” she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning with which she had spoken before. “There is no time to lose.” He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of her arms, looking at her reverently. But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the hands that were life, the arms that were love. She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache. Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over her shoulder to him: “Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?” she asked, with a struggling sweetness in her voice. He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar: “I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books.” “The trouble is,” she replied, “the trouble is that the authors are right and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidents to each other in life,” and she passed out into the hall. “Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe,” he replied, “if we cared to look at it in that way; but we’d better not!” He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly stopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything that he had brought together from such distances of place and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in. “Are you coming?” she called faintly from the hall. “I am coming,” he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he stopped again and looked back. Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow her into some divine haven.