She and Hugh were to have a slight lunch when they returned from church. She resolved that they would hurry over this, and then go to the Brands’ house, just to wish them “A Merry Christmas!” They could be back in the little house with the verandah before Miss Latimer and Mr. Somerset could arrive. They had to knock twice before Mrs. Morison let them in. “She’s so busy with her cooking, ma,” Hugh explained sagaciously. And indeed when she did come, her face was very red, and she was so pre-occupied that, as Hugh lingered a moment to knock snow from his boot, she actually hurried back to her kitchen and left them to close the door themselves. “Don’t roast yourself as well as the chickens, Mrs. Morison!” Lucy called after her playfully. Their nice little cold meal was awaiting them on a side table in the dining-room, the dining-table itself being already occupied by the best napery, crystal and cutlery, set out by Lucy before she went to church. Hugh was all eagerness to see his little cousins and their Christmas cards and gifts—they were sure to have so many, and such beauties! After all, the call, though satisfactory in one sense, proved less so in another. It convinced Lucy that her sister had not been hurt or offended; it also convinced her that the whole matter had been of such slight interest to Florence that she had forgotten all about it! Jem Brand did not seem even to know that Lucy had been invited to be his guest! Said he— “You ought to have been invited, and anyhow, wouldn’t you stay on now? There are a good many people coming, but there would be room for you, never fear.” Even when he heard she was to have guests of her own, he actually suggested that he should send round a cab and bring them all over! It seemed to Lucy that Florence spoke rather sharply to Jem, saying significantly, that he had better not go into the dining-room again till dinner was served. She supposed Florence was tired and cumbered. Florence had sent out a hundred and fifty Christmas cards—“Private cards, of course!”—one conventional salutation alike to oldest friend and newest acquaintance, to the wise and to the simple, the merry and the sad. And Florence had received already two hundred cards, and nearly one hundred were from people whom she had overlooked, and whom she would have to “remember” at New Year. Also, the cutler had not sent home her new fruit knives with the agate handles, and she would have to use her old ones. It was enough to provoke a saint! The two little Brand girls were whining and fuming. “Muriel is out of sorts,” said the lady nurse, “because she has been allowed to breakfast with her mamma and has eaten too much cake, and Sybil is out of temper because her papa has given Muriel a mechanical walking doll, and she does not think her own gift of toy drawing-room furniture so good.” She would have stamped on it had not the lady nurse taken it away.