“All of them,” she cried, “supporting you in your wickedness and disobedience. I won't 'ave it nor endure it not a minute longer. They can 'ave my notice this moment, and I won't take it back, not if they ask me on their bended knees--no, I won't--and that's straight.” For an instant she frowned upon them all--then she was gone, the door banging after her. They gazed at one another. There was a dreadful silence. Once Mary whispered: “Suppose she really does.” Hamlet only was unmoved. Ten minutes later, Rose, the housemaid, entered with the tea-things. For a little she was silent. Then the three faces raised to hers compelled her confidence. “Nurse has been and given notice,” she said, “and the Missis has taken it. She's going at the end of the month. She's crying now in the kitchen.” They were alone again. Mary and Helen looked at Jeremy as though waiting to follow his lead. He did not know what to say. There was Tragedy, there was Victory, there was Remorse, there was Triumph. He was sorry, he was glad. His eyes fell upon Hamlet, who was now stretched out upon the rug, his nose between his paws, fast asleep. Then he looked at his sisters. “Well,” he said slowly, “it's awfully nice to have a dog--anyway.” Such is the true and faithful account of Hamlet's entrance into the train of the Coles. CHAPTER III. CHRISTMAS PANTOMIME I I am sometimes inclined to wonder whether, in very truth, those Polchester Christmases of nearly thirty years ago were so marvellous as now in retrospect they seem. I can give details of those splendours, facts and figures, that to the onlooker are less than nothing at all--a sugar elephant in a stocking, a box of pencils on a Christmas tree, “Hark, the Herald Angels...” at three in the morning below one's window, a lighted plum-pudding, a postman four hours late, his back bent with bursting parcels. And it is something further--behind the sugar cherries and the paper caps and the lighted tree--that remains to give magic to those days; a sense of expectancy, a sense of richness, a sense of worship, a visit from the Three Kings who have so seldom come to visit one since. That Christmas of Jeremy's ninth year was one of the best that he ever had; it was perhaps the last of the MAGICAL Christmases. After this he was to know too much, was to see Father Christmas vanish before a sum in arithmetic, and a stocking change into something that “boys who go to school never have”--the last of the Christmases of divine magic, when the snow fell and the waits sang and the stockings were filled and the turkey fattened and the candles blazed and the holly crackled by the will of God rather than the power of man. It would be many years before he would realise that, after all, in those early days he had been right...