The Bishop’s voice was low, lower than he knew, and it is sometimes impossible to hear or to speak. It was a long time before Lucy’s hands dropped from a face a-quiver. She looked about, startled to know herself alone when she felt only him, everywhere. But quietly the outer door had closed. PART IV Stars thridded the bare elm-boughs overhead. Always against the blackness of the next corner loomed a blurred ball of light, which, on approach, turned into a familiar street lamp. The broad avenue was almost deserted. From blurred light to light ran a space of pavement blessedly firm to hurrying, uncertain feet, yet lights and pavement seemed to multiply and stretch away indefinitely. But if one hurried, hurried on, there was someone waiting at the end. Sometimes, against the dark faces of the housefronts, window-shades were rolled up, like eyelids opening, on home-pictures that reminded the Bishop it was Christmas night. The morning of the day gleamed through mist like one of the street lamps he was passing. Faces kept forming close against his eyes and then melted again into gray, into black, Mrs. Graham’s and Murray’s and Lucy’s, suffering, lonely faces that had been locked against his pleading. Now there only remained to get home. A street of black housefronts, closed upon good cheer within, the Bishop’s own street, any door of which would have opened readily to his need, had anyone guessed it! But illness had left in his brain only a great homing instinct. He knew he must not stop along the way, because like all other men in all the world on Christmas-night, he, too, had his own, and there, at home, his own were waiting for him. For at last he knew why he was hurrying so, it was because Annie was there, at home. He might not find her below in the hall, but she would be upstairs, listening for him and waiting. He knew that when his key turned, he should hear her voice, liquid and sweet with welcome, come floating down the shadowy stair, “Up here! I’m up here, Hal!” Yet when at length the Bishop did press his key into the lock, the house was silent and the hallway unlighted and chilly. Still Annie’s presence seemed all-pervasive, catching him back to older days, and making him, as he groped for a match and lighted the gas-jet, forget to wonder why Mrs. Graham had not returned or to surmise the train missed for the baby’s sake. As he hung overcoat and hat on a peg of the towering black-walnut rack, his face being reflected to unseeing eyes in the glimmering mirror, the familiarity of the action and the security of his own hallway and open study door steadied and strengthened him. He had got home safe and sound after all, and now before climbing up to bed and undertaking all the weariness of undressing, he would put on his old black velvet dressing gown, and would sit down in the dark, in the sagging old leather armchair, and rest a little, and look out on the stars in the band of night-sky stretching below the rim of the piazza roof.