To such troubled thoughts she fell asleep, and when she awoke in the morning the weather had settled the matter for her. It was bitterly cold, and a furious snowstorm was blocking up the pathways and making a visit to the theatre beyond a safe or pleasant probability. Madame sadly admitted the condition, but the day went happily forward; and about two o’clock Leonard and St. Ange and Peter arrived, and the judge opened the Christmas room, and then there was two hours of pure mirth--of surprise without end; of beautiful gifts whose donors were to speculate about; half-guesses sent into conscious faces; questions asked with beaming eyes; all the delightful uncertainties which love could make, and love alone unravel. The Christmas dinner followed, and after it a dance, which madame, with Peter for her partner, opened. Every one joined in it, and the merriest of evenings was thus inaugurated. So nobody regretted the theatre, not even madame, for she had been privately informed by St. Ange that the box was reserved for the great naval performance on the seventh of January; and that it would be one far more worth seeing, one never to be forgotten. And madame kept this bit of anticipatory pleasure as a little secret, and was as gay as a child over it. Leonard also was in his most charming mood, and Sappha was divinely happy; her beauty was enchanting, and her manner so mild and sweet that she diffused on all hands a sense of exquisite peace and felicity. For Leonard had whispered to her such words of contrition and devotion as erased totally and forever the memory of his unworthy temper and suspicions. And after that confession there could be only sorrow for his fault, and delight in pardoning and forgetting it. All throughout the following week he preserved this sunny mood. He was undoubtedly very busy, for the naval dinner was to be given on the twenty-ninth of December, and he was the director of the committee of young men who were turning the great dining room of the City Hotel into a marine palace. It was his taste which colonnaded it with the masts of ships wreathed with laurel and all the national flags of the world--except that of Great Britain. It was Leonard who devised the greensward, in the midst of which was a real lake, and floating on it a miniature United States war frigate.