es,
rough posts each with an accessory of shadow, an old harness in
grotesque loops, ceased to be background and assumed roles. The
background itself, modified by many an unshadowed promontory, was
accented in caverns of manger and roof. The place revealed mystery and
beauty in the casual business of saying what had to be said.

Mary filled her arms with hay, and turned to the manger. The raw smell
of the clover smote her, and it was as sweet as Spring repromised. She
stood for a moment with the hay in her arms, her breath coming
swiftly....

Down on the marsh, not half an hour away, he was coming to her, to be
with her, as she had grown used to imagining him. She had thought that
he was not coming, and he was almost here.... She knew now that she was
glad of this, no matter what it brought her; glad, as she had never
known how to be glad of anything before. He was coming--there was a
thrill in the words every time that she thought them. Already she was
welcoming him in her heart, already he was here, already he was born
into her life....

... With a soft, fierce rush of feeling not her own, it seemed to her
that her point of perception was somehow drawn inward, as if she no
longer saw from the old places, as if something in her that was not used
to looking, looked. In the seat where her will had been was no will. But
somewhere in there, beyond all conflict, she felt _herself_ to be.
Beyond a thousand mists, volitions, little seekings for comfort,
rebellions at toil, the cryings of personality for its physical own, she
stood at last, herself within herself. And that which, through the slow
process of her life and of life and being immeasurably before her, had
been seeking its expression, building up its own vehicle of incarnation,
quite suddenly and simply flowered. It was as if the weight and the
striving within her had been the pangs of some birth. She stood, as
light of heart as a little child, filled with peace and tender
exaltation.

These filled her on the road which she took to meet him--and took alone,
for she would have no one go with her. ("What's come over Mary?" they
asked one another in the kitchen. "She acts like she was somebody else
and herself too.") The night lay about her as any other winter night,
white and black,--a clean white world on which men set a pattern of
highway and shelter, a clean dark sky on which a story is written in
stars; and between--no mystery, but only growth. Out toward the