Ah, had he! It was hard to remember that. _Had_ he said so? "I think," she whispered, "you need not keep him away now, if he should want to come." As her friend said nothing, she added in a voice more like a child than a great Duchess, "You may trust me. I _want_ him to come-- There, I've said it. I _hope_ he'll come. If he doesn't-- "Why, then, you'll go away," he finished. "You can't bear it." The Duchess shook her head. "I'll go to him, on the contrary." "You were going?" "Yes, when you came." He cried out: "Oh, I'm off then, I'm off for London, and I shan't be back for the Christmas holidays. You may count on me." The Duchess smiled delightfully, and was in a second the elusive woman, intangible, and impossible to seize. "No, no," she said, "please don't exile yourself either to-day or to-morrow. It isn't after all the moment, and I want to prove to you that I'm not jealous. I've decided to wait until that lovely woman has gone away." The waste of his territory, its largesse to no purpose, its vastness through which only unbearable silences echoed; accumulated revenues and hereditary title, only added to the Duke's melancholy. He had planned the Christmas house party too late as it proved, and refusals, one after another, came in during the week. The poor gentleman's mood led him to resent each fresh defection on the part of his guests as personal wounds inflicted by old friends at a time when charity would have been sweet. And it was with really tragic melancholy that he threw the last letter down exclaiming: "And they all with one consent began to make excuse." He quite waited for a line from Mrs. Falconer, which would tell him that she, too, had decided to abandon him: and the thought of what he believed to be Jimmy's complications at The Dials caused him half to regard the matter with a pity for her. "If Jimmy _isn't_ married, he's the most whited of sepulchres!" The satin shine of holly, the glimmer of pearly mistletoe, the odor of spruce and pine, and heavier scent of hemlock bewitched the castle throughout with their fragrance. Setting and decoration suggested a feast, and the Duke as he passed through the upper halls, and by the doors of his children's rooms, saw holly wreaths on the walls and that the little gates were twisted with green. The day was dampish and the Duke, unable to bear the silence of the house, with his gun and his dogs and with a lack of resource and superfluity of ennui to urge him from the castle, started to tramp off his unrest. The afternoon was young, and the bare, naked sunlight fell over the bare nakedness of the land. The little low clumps of neutral-colored underbrush, the reddish-brown thickets between wood and field, would hide the birds well, and with his gun across his back, his hands in his pockets, his Grace covered many miles before he at length stopped to take in the length of the land or to listen for wings.