Now at last I see the Christmas-tree deserted, forgotten, while the tables at the end of the room are unloading themselves of their cakes and oranges and the score of other items appertaining to the feast. This is a silent time, save for the exploding crackers and occasional shrieks of fearsome delight; but it is over at last. The games begin, and with them reawakens all the old turmoil in redoubled fury. Though each of us has eaten more than is credible in any but a Downland-bred child, this in no way impairs our agility. We hunt the slipper; we sing ourselves hoarse with ‘Green Gravel’; we play ‘Blind Man’s Buff,’ and the Reverend, being caught, is allowed to go through the part of Blind Man, at his own jovial suggestion, without the handkerchief over his eyes. And now two things come back to me more significant than all. But for this busy quarter of an hour—when he is staggering to and fro, clutching at pinafores and shock heads of hair—the Reverend has been rather a silent and deliberate figure in the midst of all the madcap business, more detached and quiet than I have known him at other Christmas gaieties bygone. He has hovered about on the fringe of the merrymaking, happy-faced as ever, yet with a certain slowness, a languor, that I have never marked in him before. This is the one thing. The other is a random glance I take over my shoulder at the Christmas-tree, when the fun and frolic are at their highest. Pathetically forlorn and deserted it looks, with bits of string clinging here and there to its drooping green fronds, a single shining trinket hanging forgotten on one of its lower branches, and half its glory already quenched. As I look at it, every moment sees another candle gutter out and die. A few minutes more, I think, and it will be nothing but a sombre and solemn fir-tree again, ready to be carted down and set once more amidst the silent glooms of the wood. Somehow, in spite of myself, the two things, the two thoughts, blend themselves indivisibly together. I am glad now that, while through the long evening I poured into the Reverend’s patient ear much idle chatter and many feather-brained conceits, I said no word to him about the dying Christmas-tree. While I have been sitting here, turning over these thoughts, my own candles have burned low: the wood-fire has sunk to a few waning embers: it must be growing late, how late I do not guess until I turn to look at the clock. Almost midnight! Another minute or two, and then—Christmas morning! Perhaps, as the night is so clear and still, I shall be able to hear the hour chime in far-off Stavisham. I go to the window, throw back the casement against the rustling ivy, and look forth.