It was Christmas Eve, and now the bells in the tower rang out in sudden and tuneful chime, flinging their merry peal far and wide over leafless woodland and frozen meadow. They blended, too, with the ring of belated blades on the ice-bound mere behind, and the sound of voices mellowed by distance. To this girl, now hurrying along the field path, her little skates dangling from her wrist, but for the events of the last half-hour how sweet and hallowed and homelike it would all have been; glorified, too, by the presence of _one_! Now, anger, disgust, contempt filled her mind; and her heart was aching and sore with the void of an ideal cast out. One was there as she struck into the garden path leading up to the terrace. He was pacing up and down smoking a cigar. "Well?" he said, turning suddenly upon her. "Well, and have you had time to reconsider your very hastily expressed opinion?" "It was not hastily expressed. It was deliberate," she replied quickly. "I have no words for a coward. I said that before." "Yes, you said that before--for the amusement of a mob of grunting yokels, and an odd social equal or two. And now you repeat it. Very well. Think what you please. It is utterly immaterial to me now and henceforward. I will not even say good-bye." He walked away from her in the other direction, while she passed on. A half impulse was upon her to linger, to offer him an opportunity of explanation. Somehow there was that about his personality which seemed to belie her judgment upon him. But pride, perversity, superficiality of the deductive faculty, triumphed. She passed on without a word.