The Innkeeper's Wife[Christmas Story]

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At dawn, Seraia, wife of the innkeeper, awoke, and her first instinctive glance showed that Elah, her husband, was not there beside her. She sighed and for some moments lay still, facing another day, feeling anew the weight of sadness that bore down upon her heart. She thought of the troubles in Judea, the last trace of liberty gone, the people oppressed by the harsh rule of the Roman procurator, forced to worship as idols the images of the deified Emperor set up in the temple. Through-out the land, between apathy and recklessness, a blight had spread, brigandage and robbery were rife, the taint of moral decay, of sacrilege, exaction and hung in the air. Would nothing, she asked herself, ever come to change it? Above all, with deepening anxiety, she thought of her own difficulties, and of the painful problem which, beneath her own roof, increasingly beset her.

The morning was grey and cheerless with a harsh breeze blowing across from Mount Hermon but, urged by her sense of duty, she stirred, got up and began to clothe herself, shivering slightly, for Bethlehem lay high on its windswept spur and the air at this season was sharp and chill. She was a comely woman still, despite her forty odd years, short and trim in figure and with an open face marked by lines of kindness. Her expression in repose showed a pleasant quietude. Her grey eyes, matching the sober hue of the robe she now girded about her, had in their depths the look of one who sees more than outward things, one who has, perhaps of necessity, created an interior life all her own.

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