The young donors of the eclipsed offering stand by with swelling hearts. Their Christmas gift to the dead has pinched them to the extent of absolutely precluding the purchase of “Bobs’” last photograph, tantalizingly beaming on them from the stationer’s front window, to the attainment of which their mother has stony-heartedly refused to help them with a loan; and about which Miss Brine has benightedly observed that thirty photographs of one individual must be enough for any private collection, were he ten times as great a hero as Lord Roberts. The monstrousness of the supposition that any such hypothetical demi-god can exist or ever has existed, and the consequent conviction that the governess is a pro-Boer, produces a warmth of feeling against that lady, which her departure upon her Christmas holidays only partially cools. “They are coming home to-night, I hear,” says Mrs. Prince, stopping, in her turn, to deposit her sumptuous circle of orchids, but laying it unobtrusively just within the stone coping at the grave-foot, and somehow not making the children feel as small as Féodorovna had done. “I believe so.” “_What_ a home-coming!” raising and straightening herself again. “Yes.” “All animals creep to their lairs to die,” pursues Mrs. Prince, shaking her head, and with a poetic excursion into the regions of natural history not usual with her. “I suppose that that is his feeling.” “I suppose so.” “How dreadfully flat those boys are singing!” says Féodorovna, affectedly, putting her hands over her ears to exclude the sound of the choir practice, floating in annual struggle with the Christmas anthem from the just dim-lit church. Féodorovna’s ear for music has never been her strong point, and a jarred surprise at the pretended suffering mixes with Mrs. Darcy’s disgust at the petulant bad taste of the interjection. “Shall we see poor Lavinia at church to-morrow, do you think?” asks Mrs. Prince, real kindliness struggling in her tone with a rather morbid curiosity. “I declare that I shall hardly dare to look in the direction of their seat. What a life she must have led during these last five months, _tête-à-tête_ in cheap lodgings, for I fear their means would not run to anything very luxurious--with that poor old gentleman going over the same sad story, day after day, day after day, as he did in the case of Bill! And I am afraid that sickness is not likely to have improved his temper. I am sure that I should not be surprised to hear that her reason had given way.”