After luncheon they all three went on a round of visits to Madoline’s cottagers—those special, old-established families to whose various needs, intellectual and corporeal, she had ministered from her early girlhood, and who esteemed a Christmas visit from Miss Lawford as the highest honour and privilege of the year. It was pleasant to look in at the tidy little keeping-rooms, where the dressers shone with a bright array of crockery, and the hearths were so neatly swept, and the pots and pans and brass candlesticks on the chimney-piece, and the little black-framed scriptural pictures, were all decorated with sprigs of ivy and holly. Pleasant the air of dinner and dessert which pervaded every house. Daphne had a basket of toys for the children; a basket which Gerald insisted upon carrying, looking into it every now and then, and affecting an intense curiosity as to the contents. The sky was dark, save for one low red streak above the ragged edge of the wooded lane, when they went back to afternoon tea: and what a comfortable change it was from the wintry world outside to Madoline’s flowery morning-room, heavy with the scent of hyacinths and Parma violets, and bright with blazing logs! The low Japanese tea-table was drawn in front of the fire, and the basket-chairs stood ready for the tea-drinkers. ‘I was afraid Aunt Rhoda would be here to tea,’ said Daphne, sinking into her favourite seat on the fender-stool, in the shadow of the draped mantelpiece. ‘Is it not delicious to have this firelight hour all to ourselves? I always feel that just this time—this changeful light—stands apart from the rest of our lives. Our thoughts and fancies are all different somehow. They seem to take the rosy colour out of the fire; they are dim and dreamy and full of change, like the shadows on the wall. _We_ are different. Just now I feel as if I had not a care.’ ‘And have you many cares at other times?’ asked Gerald scoffingly. ‘A few.’ ‘The fear that your ball-dress may not fit; or that some clumsy fox-hunting partner may smash the ivory fan which Lina gave you yesterday.’ ‘Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward,’ answered Daphne sententiously. ‘Do you think, because I live in a fine house, and have food and raiment found for me, that I do not know the meaning of care?’ ‘Well, I should fancy there is a long way between your comprehension of the word and that of a Whitechapel seamstress: a widow, with five small children to keep, and a lodging to pay, upon the produce of her needle, with famine or the workhouse staring her in the face.’ ‘It is the hour for telling ghost-stories,’ exclaimed Daphne, kneeling at her sister’s side to receive her cup and saucer, and trifling daintily with the miniature Queen Anne tongs as she helped herself to sugar. ‘Lina, tell us the story of this house. It ought to be haunted.’