‘You wouldn’t be shocked if I came in as late as ten o’clock?’ ‘I mean to sit up till two,’ protested Daphne. ‘It is my first Christmas at home, since I was in the nursery. It must be a Shakespearian Christmas. We’ll have a wassail bowl: roasted apples bobbing about in warm negus, or something of that kind. I shall copy out some mediæval recipes for Spicer. Come as late as you like, Edgar. Papa is sure to go to bed early. Christmas will have a soporific effect upon him, as well as upon Mrs. Turchill, no doubt; and the Ferrers people will go when he retires; and we can have no end of fun in the billiard-room, where not a mortal can hear us.’ ‘You seem to be providing for a night of riot—a regular orgy—something almost as dissipated as Nero’s banquet on the lake of Agrippa,’ said Gerald, laughing at her earnestness. ‘Why should not one be merry for once in one’s life?’ ‘Why indeed?’ cried Gerald, ‘_Vogue la galère_. “Forget me not, en _vogant la galère_.” There’s a line from an early English poet for you, my Shakespearian student.’ Christmas Day was not joyless. Daphne, so fitful in her mirth, so sudden in her intervals of gloom—periods of depression which Sir Vernon, Aunt Rhoda, and Madoline’s confidential maid and umquhile nurse Mowser, stigmatised as sulks—was on this occasion all sunshine. ‘I have made up my mind to be happy,’ she said at breakfast; which meal she and Madoline were enjoying alone in the bright cheery room, the table gay with winter flowers and old silver, a wood fire burning merrily in the bright brass grate. ‘Even my father’s coldness shall not freeze me. Last Christmas Day I was eating my heart at Asnières, and envying that vulgar Dibb, whose people had had her sent home, and hoping savagely that she would be ever so sick in crossing the Channel. There I was in that dreary tawdry school-room, with half-a-dozen mahogany-coloured girls from Toulon, and Toulouse, and Carcassonne; and now I am at home and with you, and I mean to be happy. Discontent shall not come near me to-day. And you will taste my wassail bowl, won’t you, Lina?’ ‘Yes, dear, if it isn’t quite too nasty.’ Lina had given her younger sister license for any kind of mediæval experiments, in conjunction with Mrs. Spicer; and there had been much consultation of authorities—Knight, and Timbs, and Washington Irving—and a good deal of messing in the spacious still-room, with a profligate consumption of lemons and sherry, and spices and russet apples. With the dinner at which her father and the Rectory people were to assist, Daphne ventured no interference; but she had planned a Shakespearian refection in the billiard-room at midnight—if they could only get rid of Aunt Rhoda, whose sense of propriety was so strong that she might perhaps insist upon staying till the two young men had taken their departure.