The words had occasionally to wait, suspended as it were in mid-air, while he felt about wildly for the note on the 'cello; but, once found, the note was true and good, and likely to lead more or less easily to the next. A listener, in the corridor outside, pressed her hands to her breast, uncertain whether she felt the more inclined to laugh or to weep. Ronnie began his verse again. "O come ... all ye ... faithful ... joyful and tri ... tri ... tri ... _um_ ... phant ... O come, ye, O come ye, to Beth ... Beth ... Beth ... Be--eth--le--_hem!_" He paused, exhausted by the effort of drawing Bethlehem complete, out of the complication of the Infant's four vibrating strings. He paused, and, lifting his eyes, looked into the mirror--and saw therein the face of a woman, watching him from beside the door; a lovely face, all smiles, and tears, and tenderness. At first he gazed, unable to believe his eyes. But, when her eyes met his, and she knew that he saw her, she moved quickly forward, kneeled down beside him, and--it was the face of his wife, all flooded with glad tenderness, which, resting against his shoulder, looked up into his. She had spoken no word; yet at the first sight of her Ronnie knew that the cloud which had been between them, was between no longer. "Helen," he said; "Oh, Helen!" CHAPTER XIX UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN Ronnie laid down his bow, and put his right arm round his wife. He still held the precious Infant of Prague between his knees, his left hand on the ebony finger-board. "My darling!" Helen said. "So we shall be at home for Christmas after all. How glad I am!" He looked at her dumbly, and waited. He felt like the prodigal, who had planned to suggest as his only possible desert, a place among the hired servants, but was so lifted into realisation of sonship by the father's welcome, that perforce he left that sentence unspoken. So Ronnie looked at her dumbly, reading the utter love for him in her eyes. Back came the words of his hymn, replete with fresh meaning. "O come, all ye faithful, Joyful and triumphant!" They were such faithful eyes--Helen's; and now they seemed filled with triumphant joy. "Ronnie," she said, "do you remember how I wrote to you at Leipzig, that this Christmas we would have a Christmas-tree? Did not you wonder, darling, why I said that?" "Yes," answered Ronnie. "I thought of it this evening when I saw a Christmas-tree at the lodge. I had meant to ask you the night I reached home, but I did not remember then." "Ah, if you had," she said, "if you only had!" "Well?" he questioned. "Tell me now." "Ronnie, do you remember that in that letter I said I had something to tell you, and that I enclosed a note, written some weeks before, telling you this thing?" "Yes, dear," said Ronnie. "But you forgot to enclose the note. It was not there. I tore the envelope right open; I hunted high and low. Then we concluded you had after all considered it unimportant."