His father relieved, Tom mended the fire in the grate; and when he found the nurse dozing in her chair, he woke her and persuaded her to go and rest in the adjoining room, promising to call her instantly if she were needed.

Left alone with his mother, he tiptoed to the bedside and stood for many minutes looking with sorrow-blurred eyes at the still, rigid face on the pillow.  It was terribly like death; so like, that more than once he laid his hand softly on the bed-covering to make sure that she still breathed.  When he could bear it no longer, he crossed the room to the western window, drawing the draperies and standing between them to stare miserably out into the calm, starlit void.  While he looked, a meteor burned its way across the inverted bowl of the heavens, and its passing kindled the embers of the inextinguishable fire.

And, lo, the star ... came and stood over where the young child was. The curtains of the void were parted by invisible hands, and down the long vista of the centuries he saw the familiar scene of the Nativity, dwelt on so often and so faithfully in his childhood training that it seemed almost like a part of the material scheme of the universe:  the Babe in the manger; the shepherds watching their flocks; the heavenly host singing the triumphant anthem of the ages, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace; the star of Bethlehem shining serenely above a world lying in darkness and in the shadow of death.

Was it all true? or was it only a beautiful myth?  If it were true, where was the proof?  Not in history, for this, the most wonderful and miraculous thing in all the story of mankind, stands unrecorded save by the pens of those who were themselves under the spell of it.  In subsequent marvels and wonder-workings?—­he shook his head mournfully.  If any such there had been, those impartial witnesses who must have known and should have spoken were silent, and now all the earth was silent:  storms rose in their fury and were calmed for no man’s Peace, be still; earthquakes engulfed pagan and Christian believer alike; all nature was cruel, relentless, mechanical.

Was there nothing then to reach down the ages from that Christmas morning so long ago to make the beautiful first-century myth a latter-day reality?  Tom cast about him hopelessly.  There was the Church—­one and indivisible, if the myth were true.  The slow Gordon smile gathered at the corners of his eyes.  He remembered a thing his mother had said to him long ago, when, in a moment of boyish confidence, he had told her of the climb to Crestcliffe Inn and its purpose.  “Ardea’s a dear girl, as the children of this world go, Thomas; she’s been right loving and kind to me since we’ve come to be such close neighbors.  But”—­with a note of solemn warning in her voice—­“you must never forget that she’s an Episcopalian, a lost soul, dead in forms and ceremonies and trespasses and sins.”  So his mother scoffed at Ardea’s