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?”

“I have always done it, haven’t I?  And Hector was with me till a few minutes ago, when he took it into his foolish old head to run after a rabbit.  Is your mother any better this afternoon?”

“Sit down,” he commanded abruptly.  “I want to talk to you.”

She hung the bunch of holly on the twigged limb of a small oak and sat down on a moss-covered rock.  Tom sprawled at her feet in the dry leaves, and for a little while he was silent.

“You haven’t told me yet how your mother is,” she reminded him.

“She is just the same; lying there so still that you have to look close to see whether she is breathing.  The doctor says that if there isn’t a change pretty soon, she’ll die.”

“O Tom!”

He looked up at her with the old boyish frown pulling his eyebrows together.