It was at the dessert, when the banquet was nearing its close and Mrs. Paradyne had drawn on her gloves, that Sir Simon told Talbot he was to go and read daily with Paradyne at Mr. Henry's. Mr. Henry's kind offer, he called it; and he spoke a few emphatic words of praise of the hardworking usher. Apparently the theme was not palatable to Mrs. Paradyne. She folded her gloved hands one over the other, said a word or two in slighting disparagement of Mr. Henry, and then resolutely closed her lips. Evidently she had not yet forgiven the mistake which had brought them to Orville. George, as if reading her thoughts and struck with their injustice, glanced reproachfully at her as he turned to Sir Simon. "Mr. Henry is very kind to me," said the boy: "he is kind to us all. Nobody knows how good he is. He must be very lonely to-day. He was to have dined with us." Sir Simon gave a start. "I _wish_ I had asked him here! The thoughtless savage I was! No more right feeling about me than if I'd never heard of Christmas. I might as well have been born a Red Indian." Mr. Henry was at home, eating his dinner alone. Not potatoes or suet-pudding to-day: he had learned to keep Christmas in Germany, and was lavish in its honour. As George—a great deal too open-speaking to please his mother—said, he had been invited to Mrs. Paradyne's, but when she arranged to go to Sir Simon's she sent an apology to Mr. Henry. Mrs. Butter cooked him a fowl and made him a jam-pudding. He went to church in the morning and stayed for the after-service. As he sat over the fire after dinner, in the twilight of the evening, he could not help feeling as if he were alone in the world—that there was nobody to care for him. At the best, his life, in its social aspect, was not a very happy one. He had a great deal of care always upon him, and he saw no chance of its ever being removed; but he was learning to live for a better world than this. Miss Rose Brabazon had let her tongue run riot the previous day, telling him something confidentially—he could not make out what. Rose's own ideas were obscure upon the point, therefore it was too much to expect they would be clear to him. The young lady thought that "Trace and Emma and 'some of them' feared he might have been capable of taking papa's diamond pencil-case, just as much as the real thief who came in at the glass doors and stole it." It had startled Mr. Henry beyond measure; _startled_ him, and thrown him into a mass of perplexity. The impression conveyed to him was, not that he was suspected of taking the pencil, but, that he might be capable of taking one. What reason could they have for believing him capable of such a thing?