Needless to say all through the day of Christmas Eve my thoughts were with the gathering in our house on the slopes of Mount Royal. I saw in fancy every detail of the lugubrious pomp through which Christians contradict their Saviour in his affirmation that there is no death. Solemnity, blackness, muffled drums, and long lines of men throwing awe into their faces—would smite the heart with a sense of the final, the irreparable, the gone and lost. Flowers would lend a timid touch of brightness, but they would bloom in little more than irony. The roll of many wheels, the tramp of many feet, and a funeral service in which the triumphant note itself would be turned into a dirge, these would be the massive accompaniment to the few sobs welling up from hearts in which they would be irrepressible. Though shut out in person, in spirit I was there, standing in the shrouded room, witnessing my mother’s farewell kiss, watching the lid placed on the coffin, marching with my brothers, kneeling in the church, hearing the clods fall in the grave. At the very moment when Mrs. Barry handed me a cup of tea I was saying to myself, “Now it is all over, and they are coming back to the darkened, empty house.” I was not cheerful as a companion, and apparently no one expected me to be so. We can scarcely be said to have talked; we merely kept each other company. It was Miss Barry herself who suggested, when we had finished tea, that she and I should take a walk. The weather had grown clear, bright, and windless. All along the promenade there was Christmas in the shops and in the air. It was not like any Christmas I had ever known before, with the blare, the lights, the gay, homeless people, and the thundering of breakers under starlight; but some essential of the ancient festival was present there, and it reached me. It reached me with a yearning to have something belonging to me that I could claim as my own—something to which I should belong and that wouldn’t cast me off—something that would love me, something that I should love, with a love different from that with which even the City of Friends could supply me. But out on the crowded, starry sea-front we neither walked nor talked. We sauntered and kept silent. On my side, I had the feeling that there was so much to say that I could say nothing; on hers, I divined that there was the same. I will not affirm that in view of all the circumstances I could be anything but uneasy; and yet I was ecstatic. This wonderful creature was beside me, comforting me, liking to be with me! But if she knew exactly who I was....