Christmas at Dorchester was not a period of festivity to which Theodore Dalbrook had hitherto looked forward with ardent expectations, but in this particular December he found himself longing for that holiday season even as a schoolboy might long for release from Latin Grammar and suet pudding, and for the plenteous fare and idle days of home. He longed for the grave old town with its Roman relics and leafless avenues; longed for it, alas! not so much because his father, brother, and sisters dwelt there, as because it was within a possible drive of Milbrook Priory, and once being at Dorchester he had a fair excuse for going to see his cousin. Many and many a time in his chambers at the Temple he had felt the fever-fit so strongly upon him that he was tempted to put on his hat, rush out of those quiet courts and stony quadrangles to the bustle of the Embankment, spring into the first hansom that came within hail, and so to Waterloo, and by any train that would carry him to Wareham Station, and thence to the Priory, only to look upon Juanita’s face for a little while, only to hold her hand in his, once at greeting and once at parting, and then back into the night and the loneliness of his life, and law books and precedents, and Justinian and Chitty, and all that is commonplace and dry-as-dust in man’s existence. He had refrained from such foolishness, and now Christmas was at hand, his sisters were making the house odious with holly and laurel, the old cook was chopping suet for the traditional pudding which he had loathed for the last ten years, and he had a fair excuse for driving along the frosty roads to visit his widowed cousin. He had a pressing invitation from Lord Cheriton to spend two or three days of his holiday time at the Chase, an invitation which he had promptly accepted; but his first visit was to Lady Carmichael. He found the house in all things unlike what it had been when last he saw it. The dear Grenvilles had been persuaded to spend their Christmas in Dorsetshire, and the Priory was full of children’s voices, and the traces of children’s occupation. Theodore had known Jessica Grenville before her marriage, yet it was not the less a shock to find himself confronted by a portly matron and a brood of children in that room where he had seen Juanita’s sad face bent over her embroidery. There was no trace of Juanita in the spacious drawing-room to-day, and the fact of her absence almost unhinged him, and put him at a disadvantage in his conversation with Mrs. Grenville, who received him with gracious loquacity, and insisted upon his giving an immediate opinion upon the different degrees of family likeness to be seen in her four children there present.