After morning service Miss Abingdon walked to the Vicarage and bestowed her yearly gifts upon the Wrottesley family. It was a matter of conscience with her to give a present of exactly the same value to Mrs. Wrottesley as to the canon, and this year she offered her little gifts with a good deal of compunction, remembering how difficult she had often found it to be quite fair in the distribution. For Mrs. Wrottesley was failing in health, and in her own plain, unostentatious way she had made up her mind that her time for quitting this world was not very far off. She wrote her will with scrupulous exactness and justness, and having done so she made no allusion whatever to what must have been occupying her thoughts to the exclusion of everything else, but continued to live the life in which care for herself had always been conspicuously absent. She received Miss Abingdon and Jane on Christmas Day in her pleasant drawing-room which the wintry sunshine was flooding with warmth and joyousness, and she tendered her thanks for the presents which had been brought for her, assured her inquirers that she was very much better in health, and said that she had ordered no dinner at home, so that her husband and boys might be forced to accept Miss Abingdon's customary hospitality. Canon Wrottesley received his wife's statement as to the improvement of her health with ingenuous pleasure. He believed that she was really looking better, twitted her kindly on her pale cheeks, and with the optimism which declines to harbour fears and apprehensions he refused to believe that she was seriously ill. The canon himself had had a bad cold lately, and his evident wish to believe that his own malady was as serious as Mrs. Wrottesley's had something pathetic in it. If he could get rid of a heavy cold and feel quite himself by Christmas Day, his wife surely would pick up in health as soon as the warm weather should come. He believed he was doing right in making light of her ailments, and Mrs. Wrottesley saw all this quite plainly, and loved him none the less for it. 'How is your cold?' said Miss Abingdon, with sympathy in her voice, and the vicar threw back his handsome head and tapped his throat, which he said was a bit husky still, although it was no use giving way to illness. 'Master your health,' he said in a tone of muscular Christianity, 'and it won't master you--eh, mamma?' he added, with an encouraging glance at his wife's pale face on the sofa.