“You know he is always pleased to see you--we are not very early people--and this is Christmas Eve. We were to sit round the fire and tell ghost-stories, don’t you remember?” “Of course we were. I shall be here soon after nine, and I shall think over all the grizzly legends I ever heard, as I come down the hill.” He went reluctantly, leaving her standing by the fire, a contemplative figure with downcast eyes. At a little later stage in their engagement no doubt she would have gone with him to the door, or even out to the garden gate, for a lingering parting under the stars--but there was a shyness about them both in this sweet dim beginning of their union, when it was so strange to each to have any claim upon the other. “How lightly she took the whole business,” Captain Hulbert said to himself as he went up the hill. “Yet her voice trembled now and then--and her hand was deadly cold when first I clasped it. I think she loves me. A year,”--snapping his fingers gaily at the stars--“what is a year? A year of bliss if it be mostly spent with her. Besides, long engagements are apt to dwindle. I have seen such engagements--entered on solemnly like ours to-night--shrink to six months, or less. Why should one linger on the threshold of a new life, if one knows it is going to be completely happy?” The blissful lover had not been gone five minutes when Isola came creeping into the room, and put her arm round Allegra’s neck and kissed her flushed cheek. “Why, Isa, where have you been hiding all this evening?” “I had fallen asleep in my room, just half an hour before tea, and when I awoke it was five o’clock, and Löttchen told me you and Captain Hulbert were in the drawing-room. And as I know you two have always so much to talk about, I thought I wouldn’t disturb you. So I let Löttchen make tea for me in the nursery, and I stayed there to play with baby. And here you are all in the dark.” “Oh, we had the firelight--Parker forgot to bring the lamp.” “And you forgot to ring for it,” said Isola, going over to the bow-window, and drawing back a curtain. “What a lovely sky! Who would think it was Christmas-time?” The moon was in her second quarter, shining brilliantly, in the deep purple of a sky almost without a cloud. “Will you put on your hat and jacket and come for a stroll in the garden, Isa?” asked Allegra. “It is a mild, dry night, and I don’t think the air can hurt you.” “Hurt me! It will do me all the good in the world. Yes, I shall be ready in a moment.” They went out into the hall, where Allegra packed her sister-in-law carefully in a warm, fur-lined jacket, and flung a tartan shawl round her own shoulders. Then they went out into the garden, and to the lawn by the river. The moon was shining on the running water, brightly, coldly, clear, while the meadows on the opposite bank were wrapped in faint, white mists, which made all the landscape seem unreal.