Evening Star Newspaper, December 21, 1930, Page 79

Magasiue WASHINGTON, D. C, DECEMBER 21, 1930. 24 PAGES. URPLE shadows of the early Winter evening were closing in on Bethlehem. Lights glowed from the houses that lined the crooked streets. The smoke of busy hearth-fires rose straight and white on the still air. And in the largest inn the stir and bustle of the close of day was at its height. One upper room only was dark and silent where Sarah, the wife of Nathan, the innkeeper, knelt beside the body of her child. She was quiet now, for her stormy violence of grief had left her exhausted, and her face was as pale and her hands nearly as cold as those of the motionless little form on which her dark eves were fixed with aching intensity, albeit she could barely distinguish it in the deepening gloom. Sarah would have no one with her. She had rejected in the bitterness of her woe all offers of companionship. “I am quite well,” she had replied to the timid knocks of her maids upon the closed door. “If I need you I will call.” 5 Even her own husband, sitting alone in his little office behind the main room of the inn, could be of no help. Nathan's loss and hers had been too different. Nathan—whose back had somehow bowed, whose hair had become noticeably grayer in the few days of that hopeless bat- tle to save the little life which had only that morning flickered to an end—Nathan had lost his long hoped-for heir, his future pride and delight, father of his grandchildren —continuator of his line . . . While Sarah—— Her head went down on the side of the bed in a fresh paroxysm of racking sobs at the thought of the roseleaf fingers that had clung to hers; the little pink heels, warm in the palms of her hands; the great black eyes that had lighted at the sight of her—for he had been a bright baby, and had early learned to know his mother." And tomorrow even 'this silent lit- tle effigy would be taken from her to lie alone in a rocky tomb on the bleak, ridged hillside beyond the town. Nor could there ever be another in his place. Nearly 20 years they had waited and hoped and prayed;