The invitation was accepted, and the three men crossed the busy, crowded platform to take their seats in the great express train.  A porter, laden with an incredible load of paraphernalia, trying to make his way through the press, happened to jostle Sir Angus McCurdie.  He rubbed his shoulder fretfully.

“Why the whole land should be turned into a bear garden on account of this exploded superstition of Christmas is one of the anomalies of modern civilization.  Look at this insensate welter of fools travelling in wild herds to disgusting places merely because it’s Christmas!”

“You seem to be travelling yourself, McCurdie,” said Lord Doyne.

“Yes—­and why the devil I’m doing it, I’ve not the faintest notion,” replied Sir Angus.

“It’s going to be a beast of a journey,” he remarked some moments later, as the train carried them slowly out of the station.  “The whole country is under snow—­and as far as I can understand we have to change twice and wind up with a twenty-mile motor drive.”

He was an iron-faced, beetle-browed, stern man, and this morning he did not seem to be in the best of tempers.  Finding his companions inclined to be sympathetic, he continued his lamentation.

“And merely because it’s Christmas I’ve had to shut up my laboratory and give my young fools a holiday—­just when I was in the midst of a most important series of experiments.”

Professor Biggleswade, who had heard vaguely of and rather looked down upon such new-fangled toys as radium and thorium and helium and argon—­for the latest astonishing developments in the theory of radio-activity had brought Sir Angus McCurdie his world-wide fame—­said somewhat ironically: 

“If the experiments were so important, why didn’t you lock yourself up with your test tubes and electric batteries and finish them alone?”

“Man!” said McCurdie, bending across the carriage, and speaking with a curious intensity of voice, “d’ye know I’d give a hundred pounds to be able to answer that question?”

“What do you mean?” asked the Professor, startled.

“I should like to know why I’m sitting in this damned train and going to visit a couple of addle-headed society people whom I’m scarcely acquainted with, when I might be at home in my own good company furthering the progress of science.”

“I myself,” said the Professor, “am not acquainted with them at all.”

It was Sir Angus McCurdie’s turn to look surprised.

“Then why are you spending Christmas with them?”

“I reviewed a ridiculous blank-verse tragedy written by Deverill on the Death of Sennacherib.  Historically it was puerile.  I said so in no measured terms.  He wrote a letter claiming to be a poet and not an archaeologist.  I replied that the day had passed when poets could with impunity commit the abominable crime of distorting history.  He retorted with some futile argument, and we went on exchanging letters, until his invitation and my acceptance concluded the correspondence.”