“Every day for five months--sometimes _twice_ a day, for his mind is a good deal gone--I have given him all, or”--with a slight shiver--“almost all the details of the--the _accident_! If I had been asked beforehand, I should have thought that even an allusion to it would drive me mad; and I have had to describe it twice a day!” She makes her narration in a perfectly collected level voice, and her friend’s false shyness dies for ever, overwhelmed by an avalanche of compassion. “How are you alive?” she asks almost inaudibly. “You must not pity me!” returns the other, still with the awe-inspiring calm of one that has reached the limit of possible suffering, and come out beyond it into the dead waters of numbed endurance. “Other people--_all_ other people would do that; but I expect _you_ to understand. I am _glad_ to be punished! glad to be working out my sentence like a convict. It is the only thing that has given me any ease! I think that even Rupert, if he can see me--I do not think that he much believed that he would be able”--with a dragging accent of sorrowful reluctance--“but if he can, even he will think the expiation is not out of proportion to the offence!” “It is an idea that would never have occurred to him!” says Mrs. Darcy, in a tone of the gentlest chiding. “You are forgetting him!” “_Forgetting_ him!” repeats Lavinia, slowly. “Yes,” after a slight pause, “you are right; crediting him with dismal dogmas of retribution, that he would have abhorred! Yes, I must be forgetting him!” “My dear,” comes the voice of the rector, opening the door and looking in, with a brow cleared by having decided to omit the ’96 flower of speech, and defer the allusion to Rupert till New Year’s Eve, “what has possessed you to unbar the hall-door? It surely is not a night for star-gazing! _Miss Carew!_” * * * * * The Darcy Christmas Day has been worked through with its usual cheerful thoroughness. The reciprocal presentations; the church services; the workhouse dinner; the school-children’s tea, with its posthumous accompaniment of oranges and crackers; the servants’ evening party;--nothing has been scamped. The family Christmas gift to the poodle has been a photograph of Binning, which he wears upon his brow--all other available parts of his person being already occupied by the effigies of general officers--when he is walked by his beautifully frilled fore paws between Phillida and Daphne into the mistletoed kitchen to open the ball. * * * * *