For days,--days which brought back the boyhood agony of the time when he had believed himself to be Ardea's murderer,--he went softly about the house, sharing, with his father and his uncle, the watch in the sick-room; doing what little there was to be done in dumb hopelessness, and beating at times on the brazen gates of Heaven in sheer despair. There was no answer to his prayers; in his inmost soul he knew there would not be; but even in this the eternal query assailed him. Was it for lack of faith that no whisper of reply came from the unseen world beyond the veil? Or was it only because there was no ear to hear, no voice to answer? He could not tell. He made sure he was doomed to live and die, buffeting with these submerging waves of doubt--doubt of himself on one hand, and of God on the other. In that time of sore trial, his Uncle Silas's forbearance wiped out many a score of boyish resentment. There was no word of reproach, still less the harsh arraignment and condemnation to which he began to look forward on the day when Doctor Tollivar had announced his purpose of writing the facts to his brother in the faith. But Tom remarked that in the daily morning and evening prayers his uncle spoke of him as a soul in peril, and he wondered that this pointed reference, which once would have stirred the pool of bitterness to its bottom, now left him unmoved and immovable. Later, he knew it was because there was now no pool of bitterness to be stirred; the spiritual well-springs had failed and there was no water in them--either for healing or for penitential cleansing. The fifth day after his home-coming was Christmas Eve. Late in the afternoon, when the doctor had made his second visit and had gone away, leaving no word of encouragement for the watchers, Tom left the house and took the path that led up through the young orchard to the foot of Lebanon. He was deep within the winter-stripped forest on the mountain side, plunging upward through the beds of dry leaves in the little hollows, when he met Ardea. She was coming down with her arms full of holly, and for the moment he forgot his troubles in the keen pleasure of looking at her. It had not occurred to him sooner to think of her as other than the girl of his boyhood days, grown somewhat, as he himself had grown. But now he saw that she was very beautiful. None the less, his greeting was a brotherly reproof. "I'd like to know what you're thinking of, tramping around on the mountain alone," he said, frowning at her. "I have been thinking of you, most of the time, and wishing you could be with me," she answered, so artlessly as to mollify him instantly. [Illustration: "I have been wishing you could be with me."] "I ought to row you like smoke, but when you say things like that, I can't. Don't you know you oughtn't to go projecting around in the woods all alone?"