The door into the hall, slightly ajar, allowed a little light to enter the room, showing the seated figure facing the long eastward window, the black velvet gown sweeping from throat to foot, and the long pale hands stretching out on the chair arms from the wide black cuffs. Hair and profiled face gleamed silver-white in the gloom. From to time the Bishop’s right hand moved to pull the folds more closely over his knees, unconsciously, for he did not know that he was cold. Down below, under the rear piazza, at the grated iron door of the basement kitchen, the man who tended the furnace had set the whirring bell sounding again and again, but all unheeded. The two maids, returning, rang and knocked at all the doors, only to go away, baffled. The Bishop heard no sounds from without. Near the Bishop’s left hand, the corner by the window where the Friend was standing always harbored Annie’s work basket. It stood on three bamboo legs, an ample, covered basket, in which the old darning cotton was still, as long ago, a little tangled. Looking toward that little workstand the Bishop remembered that it was Annie he was sitting up to wait for. She was coming in very soon. Or was it Nan he was awaiting? Or someone else? The flowing lines of the Nazarene’s talith melted into the folds of the long curtain close to which He was standing. He was looking forth, together with the Bishop, on the Bishop’s town, where he had failed. Too tired to think about that any more, the Bishop only knew that the Friend understood failure. The little quick upward smile showed like a spent child’s, too tired to do anything but trust. Yet the Bishop’s thought, in retrospect upon his Christmas Day, was strangely clear, as he looked out on that familiar picture, white stars above in the night-blue and, below, the blackness gemmed by ruddier earth-lights. So dark now, yet so bright with sun and hope in the Christmas morning! His thought went out to the unseen houses, each holding a little group of his friends, following them to the bend of the river until his fancy walked once more among the tenements where he knew the brown babies with their great black eyes, his friends, too. Of late he had so often looked out on his little city wrapped in night, but not as now. Before, he had been thinking of his Christmas gift, the House of Friendship, which should, in the terms of some strange symbolism, give back to Westbury the beauty it had once given him. But this was not to be. He was quite clear about it all, and quiet. It was night now, and he had not done any of the things he had meant to do in the morning. He had not even gone to church. God’s chalice! He had not been able on this Christmas Day to offer it to one soul in all his Westbury!