"Not before Christmas Eve, and it may be even later, for here we don't distribute our presents till the Christmas Day." He drew a deep breath. "What ails you now?" she asked, feigning uneasiness. He laughed that hard short laugh once more. "What can ail me, dear heart? A _tête-à-tête_ with the most charming of cousins! Her husband safely out of the way, all scruples of conscience overcome; God Almighty Himself an accomplice. Could I wish for anything better?" "Leo, don't; you frighten me," she said, and crouched back in her armchair. "Why should you be frightened, my dear child?" he answered, taking her hand. "I have become a little wilder these last few days, that is all. That is, I have been trying not to come, like the honourable man I was once. There! That promise at the ferry, dear heart--(I always called you dear heart in old days, so, now we are so intimate, I may again, eh?)--that promise was rubbish, you wormed it out of me, because you are such a sly card; and----" "Leo, please, you hurt me," she protested, covering two tearful eyes with her hand. He caught her roughly by the arm and wrenched her hand from her face. "You shan't cry," he growled. "I can't bear to see you cry. Although I know your crying, like your laughter, is a farce, I can't stand your tears. Why not laugh instead? it all amounts to the same thing." "Oh, if you should be heard talking like this!" "What would it matter?" but nevertheless his eye wandered in some anxiety to the half-open doors. "I can't take you into the boudoir," she said, thinking of the litter of parcels. For a moment a picture rose before her of the child all expectation and excitement about his Christmas presents, but it quickly faded, giving place to the more vital interest of the moment. He stretched his hands out towards the door in fear and abhorrence. "You'll never get me in there again alive," he cried. "Your cursed scent gets into my brain and drives me half mad. And to-day it would be ten times worse. But I tell you what;" his eye sought the window where the afternoon sun had made small clearings in the frost pattern on the panes. "Out there in the snow it is clear and bracing; and so quiet and lonely that one could talk in peace. Shout defiance at the world, too, if one has the mind. Put on a wrap and come." She acquiesced joyously, and quickly wound a lace scarf round her head, threw over her diaphanous house dress a heavy fur-cloak, and hurried before him out at the door unseen by any one in the house. She could not refrain from congratulating herself on this point aloud, and he did so silently. Their flushed faces met the tingling cold of the winter evening. The sun was going down. A brilliant crescent moon hung in the steel blue eastern sky, above the stables, the copulas of which cut sharply into the air.