Marmaduke Heath came down to Fairburn according to his promise, but it cost him a great effort. With every stage his spirits seemed to fall and fail; and when Mrs. Myrtle at last clasped him in her arms--for Master Marmaduke was ever a great favourite of hers, and the fact of his having grown up and got married weighed with her not a feather--his wan face was paler than when she had seen it last, notwithstanding its three years of happiness and freedom. It was Christmas-time; the Rectory was a bower of ivy and holly-berries; and just within the threshold, the locality which the good housekeeper had chosen for her embrace, hung a huge bough of mistletoe, the finest that could be found in all the Chase. In the spotless kitchen, so exquisitely clean that you might, as the phrase goes, "have eaten your dinner off the floor," if it had not happened to have been a sanded one, there were preparations for sumptuous feasting; a delightful fragrance, suggestive of mince-pies with plenty of citron, pervaded Mrs. Myrtle's private parlour, where the divine mysteries of Apicius were being celebrated. The little larder, cold and immaculate as a dead sucking-pig ready for the spit, was victualled with noble meats as for a siege; while monstrous pasties and plum-puddings, too many for the broad stone slabs, reposed upon the Dutch tiles that formed its carpet. It was not intended that the inhabitants of the Rectory should eat all the good things themselves; but it was a custom of Mr. Long, aided and abetted by Mrs. Myrtle, to keep open house for about a fortnight at this festive period, and to entertain certain worthy persons, who were old and indigent, in the sanded kitchen daily. Attempts to edify the poor in those days were not made so often as they are at present, but it was held essential by all good Christian country folk to keep Christmas as a feast, and to see that others kept it. I suppose Fairburn Hall was the only house in the county where that blessed time was ignored and taken no account of; Sir Massingberd had never suffered the slightest honour to be paid to it; and his worthy deputy and _locum-tenens_, Richard Gilmore, treated it with the like contumely.