red when he crept to the
cave-entrance after a wakeful night, was this: with a terrible stealthy
silence snow was drifting down so that even the distant shining of the
gates of Eden was blotted out. It was frightening; snow had never fallen
in the world before. If it had, the Man had not seen it. Within the
walls of the garden summer had been perpetual. He stood there staring
out forlornly at the misty sea of shifting whiteness. It chilled him to
the bone. It seemed to him that the pillars of the sky had collapsed and
the dust of the moon and stars was falling. Soon everything would be
buried and the world itself would be no more. He looked at the calendar
which he had scratched upon the wall. It was the twenty-fourth day of
December. He wondered whether God knew what was happening and whether
He had planned it. Then he gave up wondering, for behind him, from the
blackness of the cave, the Woman called.

"Oh, Man," she cried, "I cannot bear this any longer!"

He groped his way to her and raised her in his arms so that her head lay
on his breast. Even in the darkness he could see the glow of her hair,
like the shadow of flame growing fainter and fainter.

"My Woman," he whispered, "what can I do for you?" And again he
whispered, "What can I do for you?"

She pressed her face close to his before she answered, petting him the
way she had been used to do in Eden. "Do for me? Nothing. You've tried
with your remedies--you've tried so hard. Poor you! If we could only
find God----"

"If we could," the Man said, "but----"

And then they both grew silent, for how could they find God when He had
climbed back to Heaven, destroying the sky-blue stairs behind Him?

"Perhaps, He still walks in Eden." It was the Woman who had spoken. "If
you were to go and watch through the bars of Eden till He comes and were
to call to Him--if you were to tell Him that I cannot bear it any longer
and that we're sorry, so sorry--that we did it in our ignorance----"
Without ending what she was saying, she fell to sobbing.

He didn't dare to tell her that the moon and stars were falling and that
the gates of Eden were blotted out. From where she lay in the blackness
of the cave she could see nothing; she was too weak even to crawl to the
entrance. As he did his best to comfort her, "If we could only again
find God----" she kept whispering.

So at last, having ordered the dog to guard her, the Man departed on his
hopeless errand. It was brave of