Directly was five or six minutes, but the fire did blaze up royally in the end. You see, it wasn't a slow-combustion-grate, and it burned too much fuel, and flared away the coal, and did all sorts of comfortable, uneconomical things. So did Jane, who had put in a whole bundle of wood. But now that the wood was past praying for, and Jane had departed, after thawing the hearts of two sponges, it was just as well to take advantage of the blaze while it lasted. And Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter, in the thickest available dressing-gowns, and pretending they were not taking baths only because the bath-room was thrown out of gear by the frost, took advantage of the said blaze to their heart's content and harked back--a good way back--on the conversation. "You never said 'Come in,' chick." "I _did_, mother! Well, if I didn't, at any rate, I always tell her not to knock. She is the stupidest girl. She _will_ knock!" Her mother doesn't press the point. There is no bad blood anywhere. Did not Sally wish the handmaiden a merry Christmas? "The cat didn't get the robin, Sally?" "Not he! The robin was too sharp by half. Such a little darling! But I was sorry for the cat." "Poor pussy! Not our pussy, was it?" "Oh no; it was that piebald Tom that lives in at the empty house next door." "I know. Horrible beast!" "Well, but just think of being out in the cold in this weather, with nothing to eat! Oo--oo--oogh!" Sally illustrates, with an intentional shudder. "I wonder who that is!" "I didn't hear any one." "You'll see, he'll ring directly. I know who it is; it's Mr. Fenwick come to say he can't come to-night. I heard the click of his skates. They've a sort of twinkly click, skates have, when they're swung by a strap. He'll go out and skate all day. He'll go to Wimbledon." The girl's hearing was quite correct. A ring came at the bell--Krakatoa had no knocker--and a short colloquy followed between Jane and the ringer. Then he departed, with his twinkly click and noiseless footstep on the snow, slamming the front gate. Jane was able to include a card he had left in a recrudescence or reinforcement of hot water. Sally takes the card and looks at it, and her mother says, "Well, Sally?" with a slight remonstrance against the unfairness of keeping back information after you have satisfied your own curiosity--a thing people are odious about, as we all know.