y just come back once to enquire whether I
want anything."

She answered nothing; she had placed herself on a chair in the window,
and was looking out at the whirls of snow.

When he had lit his small student's lamp with its green shade he
noticed a box on the table. "Look," said he, "that is my Christmas box
from home, we can put that in a corner for the present. Will you not
take off some of your wraps, and seat yourself here on the sofa? You
must be too warm in your furs."

"I shall soon be going," said she. "But thou art right, the stove does
burn well." And she began to draw off her polonaise, and put away her
fur cap and gloves--he helping her.

"But now shall we not begin to unpack?" said she, shaking back her
hair. "I should much like to know what is in the box."

"I am in no hurry," he laughingly replied. "I have just been unpacking
something far more precious to me."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," returned she, suddenly assuming
a colder tone (she had been saying _thou_). "You do not deserve that
people should be planning how to give you pleasure. I--if a mother had
sent _me_ such a Christmas box from a distance--give it me--I will undo
the string."

She hastily began cutting open the cover with a little knife of hers,
and he gazed in carefully suppressed emotion at every movement of her
exquisite hands.

"Lottka," said he; "if you and I were both together in America, and
this box had come over the sea--"

She shook her head. "No box would have come then."

"And why not, Lottka? If my mother knew thee as I know thee, dost thou
suppose she would hold thee guilty for circumstances over which thou
art powerless. Naturally she has her prejudices--like all good mothers.
But I know that she loves me more than any of her prejudices."

The girl left off her unpacking, and with her little knife cut all
sorts of patterns on the lid of the box.

"Do you call that a prejudice?" said she, without looking at him.
"Could you eat an apple that you had found lying in the dirt of the
streets? You might wash it ten times over, the repugnance would be all
the same. And who knows what foot might have trodden on it, who knows
that some slime might not have penetrated the rind, even though it
should still be sound at the core? No, no, no! It is so once for all,
bad enough that so it should be--but it must not be made even worse."

He wound his arm about her, but rather like a brother than one
passionately i