On going in on Christmas Eve, Roger was, for once, not at all sorry to find that the Dixons had friends with them. Mr. Dixon received him heartily, Ada demurely, Mrs. Dixon coldly, scarcely speaking to him at all. There was a miserable constraint and unreality about everything. Roger felt it a relief to himself, and had a bitter conviction that it was also one to Ada, when he had to tell her that he had promised Mr. Johnson to take all the organist’s duty on the following day, in order that that official might take a holiday and visit some friends. His time would, therefore, be so much taken up that he would not be able to call and see her before service. She heard his excuse with indifference, and Roger went to bed that night, and arose also on the following morning, with a heavy problem agitating his mind. How was he to treat her? What was he to do with this wilful creature whom he loved so much, and who had succeeded in making their mutual relations so miserable and so embarrassed? For it was he who had been sinned against, as he very well knew, and though in his tenderness he was ready to condone that, and would have eagerly made an effort after any reconciliation that should have reality in it, yet the sense of duty and of the fitness of things stepped in, and told him that to let a condition of things be initiated in which the woman was to be humoured even when wrong, and the man was to beg forgiveness for all misunderstandings, whether caused by himself or not, was simple madness. Yet how he was to institute anything more reasonable, he did not see, unless Ada were brought to see that she had behaved badly, of which truth not the most glimmering consciousness seemed to have been afforded her. With this trouble in his mind he went to church on Christmas morning, and tried, almost unconsciously, to find a solution to his difficulties in the language spoken to him by his music. To a certain extent he found what he wanted; he received soothing, and that alone was a help to counsel. It was not the first time that music had come to him with healing on her wings; most likely it would not be the last.