The grown-up world, unless it was going out to an evening party, yawned, and ate its customary Christmas fare, and drank it too. Then the old people played cards, and the young people sang, especially the young men with untrained voices, and the lovers behaved as if they really were in love with one another. Come and watch Rosalie. Now that day there had arrived two Christmas presents so beautiful that many an empress might have envied them. The first came early in the morning, before the postman; a curious and unusual thing. There is no doubt Santa Claus was on the war-path, for such a lovely ball and reception dress could only have been made in some magic fairyland. It was like shining silken _crêpe_, all frosted over with tiny sparkling jewels, all in white. It shone like soft pure snow in the sunlight, and fell in folds of simplest grace. It was so very simply, yet so very wonderfully made, that one wondered what it was that gave it such a beautiful effect. “Is it not too dead white to suit me?” said she to Brightcoat, after going into raptures on its beauty. “See here, there is a little box below,” said it. And Rosalie opened it, and uttered the most real cry of delight in her life. “It’s my stone, my first stone, that I loved so, all set in gold and ready to wear. Oh, Brightcoat, Brightcoat, look!” And she sat down on the bed and hid her face in the pillows, and cried from different emotions. At last she wiped away the tears and looked up, her eyes falling on the shining stone again. “I love them all as if they were my children, and that somehow the most, because it was the first. And I believe it loves me too. Look how beautiful a ray of light it sends towards me! And I never hoped to see it again.” Rosalie took it up, and kissed it, and shed tears upon it, but the light from it was never dimmed; one might have thought it was made tear-proof. “I need no other colour. This is quite enough. And you, Brightcoat.” “Yes; of course, there’s me,” said the other thoughtfully. This was the beginning of the day. But when the postman came, besides bringing letters and cards without end, some of the latter bearing halfpenny stamps after the style of circulars, he brought a parcel, also directed to Rosalie, in handwriting that the frog declared was superior to anything it had ever seen. It was opened in public, and inside was a pair of slippers as white as snow, and worked in diamonds. And they were such a curious shape they looked as if they must really be antique, because they had little square toes, and gold straps across. They reminded one of the daintiest garden clogs, so light were they, and when Rosalie put them on she wanted to dance right away. “They’re made on the same pattern as the little wooden clog I have upstairs,” cried she. “Look, Miss Crokerly, they dance of themselves,” and in excess of spirits she pirouetted round the room, and kissed both those elderly people from superabundance of excessively childish glee.