The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it. It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his own on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the country. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in the carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the forest trees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its privacies: and that had been Christmas Eve! For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she had clung to it the more positively. “It is the most beautiful night of the year!” she had replied, brushing their objection aside with that reason alone. “And it is the happiest! I will be married on that night, when I am happiest!” Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to herself--yet scarce uttered them, rather felt them: “Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot fail us became human. My love for him, which is the divine thing in my life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on that night.” When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into the house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment ranged at a respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering her even to her maid--a new spirit of silence on him--he had led her to her bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier. Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into his arms--_his_; no other’s--never while life lasted to be another’s even in thought or in desire. Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase: “_Bride of the Mistletoe_!” Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of mistletoe swung from the chandelier. Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the green spot of verdure under life’s dark skies--the undying bough into which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world: “_Bride of the Mistletoe!_”