But at the Bishop’s troubled glance her tone changed instantly, “But you yourself, Henry, have you been, are you, ill?” “Not now, not here. It is really Christmas here.” “I am glad,” she answered; then, with an unperceived catch of her breath, “if it is really Christmas--here!” “How many Christmas dinners is it, Lucy?” “I do not count them,” to herself she added, looking at him, “those that are over!” They fell to talking of the Christmases that were over. The Bishop did not know that from time to time he leaned his head back, closing his lids, and was silent while minutes ticked slowly and Lucy watched him intently. It was comforting when he opened his eyes still to see her sitting there, so alert, so alive. “So many Christmases!” he murmured. “I neither own to them,” she answered, “nor yet, not own!” Despite her many Christmases, it was with only a slight stiffening of the sinuous grace of her girlhood that Lucy moved at the Bishop’s side, to the dining-room, to the mid-afternoon holiday dinner of Westbury habit. Lucy kept every custom Westbury had had in her youth, and she made other people keep such custom, too; slight, elusive, dominant, as she was, in her great house by Westbury’s river. They passed from stately course to course exactly as they had done on that Christmas when Henry Collinton and his wife had dined with Lucy when Annie was a bride, and still earlier, the Bishop could remember dining at that table, when he was a college lad and the two cousins, girls, Annie the dark one, and Lucy, elfin and amber-tinted. The room was the same, the china and the silver the same. Beyond the two long windows ran the gray loop of the river. Many a time long ago, they had floated all three in a boat on that spangled river. The wall paper was the same, put on by French hands many a year ago. Round and round it raced a French sporting scene, trim-waisted gentlemen that rode to the hunt by wood and stream, and ladies that joined them for the huntsman’s repast, gay picnickers all, still vivid in color. It was all the same, for in Westbury things did continue blessedly unchanged. Lucy was unchanged, for all the long wearing of her widow’s black. The yellow still showed in the snowy gloss of her carefully arranged hair. Age had slightly rimmed her eyes with red, but the will-o’-the-wisp still danced in them. Her mouth, netted by wrinkles, was hardly more finely whimsical than in girlhood. As of old, when in earnest talk, she dropped her chin, still clearly chiseled, to a delicate white claw of a hand, flashing from a fall of black chiffon. Lucy treated age as she did people: like them, age could not tell whether it had penetrated her delicate aloofness.