As he listened, with an overmastering impulse he walked to the corner of the library and stood before her picture. He noticed that in the careless haste of holiday house-cleaning to-day the servant had left on the glass of the frame some finger-prints, some particles of dust. He brought a little moistened antiseptic sponge and a little red-cross gauze, and softly cleaned it as though he were touching a wound. Then he returned to the window and watched the snow falling and heard his wife's song through to the end. It was she to whom he owed everything. It was she who, a few years after their marriage, having discovered herself to be an unloved bride, had thrown her whole agonized nature into the one remaining chance of winning his love as young wife and young mother. Having seen that hope pass from her, she had withdrawn from one tragedy into a lesser one: she had withdrawn from him. And so withdrawing, she held the whole power of ruining him. Divorce--open separation--and his career as a physician in that land would have been ended. Instead, she too had come to his rescue. Slowly out of that too swift and pitiless a fate for her own life, she had begun to work for the success of his: it was of too much value to many to be brought to nothingness for the disappointment of one. The doctor stood there, looking out at the snowstorm and thinking how all the people who could most have destroyed him had spared not themselves to make him happy and successful and useful. The dining-room doors were thrown open--he went in to dinner. PART II PART II I TWO OTHER WINTER SNOWBIRDS AT A WINDOW "Do you see them coming, Elizabeth?" "Not yet--except in my mind's eye." "Your mind's eye! Always that mind's eye! Till you see them with something better than your mind's eye, don't disturb me, Elizabeth. I have just come to the Battle of Hastings. I am going to fight as King Harold. Old William the Conqueror has just finished saying his hypocritical prayers. I am arming for him!" "Arm away!" said Elizabeth, never interested in arming. She stood at the sunny window of the library. With one rosy finger-nail she had scratched some frost off a window-pane, and with her face close to the clear spot was peeping out. Her fingers tapped a contented ditty on the window-sill. A few minutes later the other voice was heard again: it came from the direction of a sofa in the room, and seemed to rise out of half-smothering cushions:--