Mr. Topsparkle had been buried more than a month, and the old year was waning. The logs were piled in the capacious fireplaces in saloon and dining-room, library and panelled parlour, at Lavendale Manor. The old servants were in new liveries; and such a store of provisions, butcher's meat and poultry, game and venison, eggs and butter, had been laid in to fill the great stone larder as would have afforded material for feasting upon a Gargantuan basis. Wax candles burnt merrily in all the lustres, and set the crystal chandelier-drops trembling; holly and yew, laurel and ivy, with waxen mistletoe-berries lurking in sly corners, adorned hall and dining-room, staircase and corridors; and there was a bustle and a movement through the old house such as had never been known there since the early years of the late lord's married life, when the great Whig leaders, Somers, Sunderland, and Godolphin, with all their following, had been entertained at the Manor. It was like the awaking of Sleeping Beauty's palace, after its century of stillness and slumber: only this time it was the princess, and not the prince, who was coming. It was not his bugle-horn, but her magic touch, which had scared the mice and the spiders, and startled the old seneschal from his torpor, and set the logs blazing, and filled the larder, and brought out the choice old wines from the cobweb-wreathed bins, and sent the sparks dancing up the chimneys, and made life where death had been. Lady Judith Topsparkle was coming to spend her Christmas at the house where she was to be mistress, so soon as she and Lavendale should be married. They were not going to defer that happy day over-long out of respect for the dead, or out of deference for the opinion of the polite world, which was tolerably used to having its codes and customs set at naught in that merry era, and might be said to be hardened and scandal-proof. "Let it be soon, love," he had said; and she had not gainsaid him. They meant to be married very quietly, and then to scamper off to the Continent, and rush from one old city to another all along the sunny south of France, and then drop down to the Mediterranean, and loiter on that enchanted shore till the fierce breath of summer drove them away; and then to Vienna, that enchanted city in which Lavendale and Wharton had led so wild a life, and onward to the Austrian Tyrol in quest of solitude, and mountain breezes cooled by the breath of the glaciers in that wild upper world where only the herdsman's hut suggests human habitation, and where the vulture and the eagle are easier to meet than mankind. "Let it be soon," he said, as he stood with her in the house whence her husband's coffin had not long been carried; and she, with her white arms wreathed round his neck, as on that night years ago in the Chinese tent at Lady Skirmisham's ball, had answered tearfully, with a sad frankness which had a touch of despair in it,