She suddenly glided forward step by step, airy sylph of unearthly joy, and threw her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses, and then darted away from him again, dancing. With his arms folded he looked at her as a stone mile-post might have looked at a ruby-throated humming-bird. "You promised," he said--"you promised that we'd find the key, and that all four of us would walk in on them to-night. But what do _you_ know about keeping promises--you girls!" "I'll keep my promise, but I hope I won't find the key," said Elizabeth, as her dance grew wilder with the rising whirlwind of expectation. "But why shouldn't papa and mamma have one more Christmas as _they_ wish it! Of course we can't care as much for old times as they do; but be reasonable, Harold!" "I can't be reasonable that way. Haven't they always told us never to pretend? Haven't they always taught us not to have secrets? Haven't they always said that a house with a secret in it wasn't a good home for children? Why can't Christmas be as open as all out of doors? Isn't that what they call being American--to be as open as all out of doors? It's the little immigrants who have secrets in them." At that moment there was a sound of feet, muffled with yarn stockings, stamping triumphantly on the porch. "Oh, there they are!" cried Elizabeth, darting out of the room to receive her guests. More slowly the gray-toned little figure with the white hair falling over his hawk eyes and with the profile of white flint followed her. And three great spirits there were that walked with the lad that day--as with thousands of other lads like him: the spirit of his race, the spirit of his land, and the spirit of his house. The real darkness of the Middle Ages was the spiritual night that settled upon children as they began to play about their homes and to ask the meanings of them--why they were built as they were--and the meaning of other things they saw in them and around them. The architects of those centuries designed their noblest buildings often with an eye to many of the worst passions of human nature. Toiling masons slowly put into mortar and stone exact arrangements for the violent and the vile: they built not for the good in human character, but against evil--not for a heaven on earth, but against a hell on earth. When the owners took possession, they had placed between themselves and the surrounding world the strongest possible proofs of a hostile and vicious attitude. Even within their homes they had fortified one intimate part against another intimate part until it was as though the ventricles of the human heart had walled themselves in distrust away from the auricles.