To Marion Dillard, in her chair before the table, with the telegram open before her, the whole setting was grotesque. All over the city, white with newly fallen snow, were the symbols of this majestic celebration of the birth of the Saviour. They were not absent in this room. Holly wreaths hung in the windows, and the strange ivory image, representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which her father had always so greatly prized, had been brought out, after the usual custom on this night, and placed on the table. It sat on a black silk cloth embroidered with a white cross. As a work of art it was not conspicuously excellent; but her father prized it for the memory of a great adventure. Marion Dillard leaned back in the chair, reviewing the events that had moved against her as though with some sinister design. Her father was dead. A cross of white marble stood on a hilltop in France to his memory. It had been erected by every people in the great war, for her father, moved by a high, adventurous idealism, too old for longer service in the American army, had taken his own fortune—and, alas, the fortune which he held in trust for another—and with it maintained a hospital base on the western front for the benefit of every injured man, friend or enemy. Marion Dillard reflected: Of what avail was it that her father had not realized that this trust money was going into his big conception? He had drawn on his resources in America until every item of his great fortune was pledged, and by some error, this estate, in trust, had gone into the common fund. Appalled, when she came to examine the accounts, Marion had endeavored to cover the matter, hoping that the decision of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in a suit to recover a tract of coal lands in the south would be decided in favor of her father’s estate, and thus furnish the money to replace this trust. And so she had somehow managed to go on. This telegram on the table was the end. “Reversed and dismissed,” were the sinister words of it. On this night commemorating the birth of that great founder of brotherhood, whose idealistic conceptions her father had always so magnificently followed, she must decide what she would do. The thing was sharp and clear before her. She must either wreck the majestic legend of her father, or degrade herself! As she had carried the thing along by various shifts since her father’s death, she could easily make it appear that she had, herself, embezzled this trust fund. That would leave the memory of her father clean; but it clearly meant that she herself could not escape the criminal courts. The heirs of her father’s friend were insistent and hostile. They would have the pound of flesh, now that the fortune was gone. For a time she sat motionless, her eyes vaguely on the carved ivory image on the table before her. Then, she got up, and, with her hands clasped behind her back, stood looking down at the crucifix.