And they’d all be looking out for her on the house step. Just to think of their dear faces fair turned her silly. She blinked away a tear and gave her bright smile. But as he smiled back it was with a certain melancholy. The farmer with his eleven children--poor, struggling fellow!--the hardworked mother, the good, industrious child, returning home with her hands full of gifts, blessed in her honest toil for them, were they not all about to taste joys from which he had deliberately cut himself off in his fastidious isolation? He had scarcely ever regretted his chosen solitariness. His beautiful old shabby home, set in the loneliness of the snowy park, the wood fire in the library in the company of a favourite book, the ministrations of a couple of well-drilled servants, an austere silence, a harmonious communion with the high spirits of the dead; that was the Christmas to which he himself had looked forward with complacency. Now he wondered; his heart contracted with a most unusual sense of pain; had he lost the best in life? If he had had a daughter by his shoulder with a white, pure forehead such as this girl had, and had seen her eyes fire with love, heard her voice tremble at the thought of meeting him, her old father, would not that have brought him a sweetness finer than the most exquisite page in Virgil? The day, which had opened blue and gold, with a high wind and clear sunshine, began to gather threatening clouds by the time the posting station was reached; and the “Dover High-Flyer” plunged away again into a snow squall with all the speed of its fresh horses. “We are like to have a seasonable Christmas,” quoth Sir Everard, and was pleased to note that, while the rest of the company grumbled and complained, the fine specimen of young womanhood opposite to him produced a warm shawl from a bundle, tucked it round her knees, and offered him the other end, declaring, with a smile, that she was as warm as a toast, and that she did love a white Christmas. They all dined at Rochester, and had hot punch, of which Miss Pounce partook with enthusiasm, but in very discreet measure. Conversation flagged on this, their last, stage. The snoring of the foreign pair who, having tied their heads up in terrible coloured handkerchiefs, leant against each other and gave themselves up to repose with much the same animal abandonment as that with which they had gobbled the beef-steak pie and gulped the hot rum of the “Bull Inn” at Rochester; the sighing fidgets of the farmer’s wife, and the grunts of her neighbour, the Dover tradesman, each time they jarred him from a fitful somnolence, alone broke the inner silence. Without, the multiple rhythm of the horses hoofs and the varying answer of the road to the wheels--now the scrunch of cobble stones, now the slushy whisper of the snow-filled rut, now the whirring ring of a well-metalled stretch--formed a monotonous whole which lulled to silence those who could not sleep.