“Never you mind,” repeats Bobby, reassuringly, seeing me blench a little at these disused amenities, pressing the hand that rests on his arm against his stout side; “it is nothing to you! bless your heart, you are the apple of his eye.”

“Am I?” reply I, laughing.  “It has newly come to me, if I am.”

“And I am his ’good, brave Bobby!’—­his ’gallant boy! ’—­do you know why?”

“No.”

“Because I am going to Hong-Kong, and he hears that they are keeping two nice roomy graves open all the time there!”

“You are not?” (in a tone of keen anxiety and pain); then, with a sudden change of tone to a nervous and constrained amenity:  “Yes, it is a nice-sized room, is not it?  My only fault with it is, that the windows are so high up that one cannot see out of them when one is sitting down.”

For father, having demolished his body-servant, and reduced mother to her usual niche-state, now turns to me, and, in his genialest, happiest society-manner, compliments me on my big house.  That is a whole day ago.  Since then, I have grown used to seeing father’s austere face, unbent into difficult suavity, at the opposite end of the dinner-table to me, to hearing the well-known old sound of Tou Tou’s shrieks of mixed anguish and delight, as Bobby rushes after her in headlong pursuit, down the late so silent passages; and to looking complacently from one to another of the holiday faces round the table, where Barbara and I have sat, during the last noiseless month, in stillest dialogue or preoccupied silence.

I love noise.  You may think that I have odd taste; but I love Bobby’s stentor laugh, and Tou Tou’s ear-piercing yells.  I even forget to think whether their mirth passes the appointed bounds I had set it.  I have mislaid my receipt of cold repression.  My heart goes out to them.

I have been a little disturbed as to how to dispose of father during the day, but he mercifully takes that trouble off my hands.  Providence has brought good out of evil, congenial occupation out of the hat-box.  He has spent all the few daylight-hours in telegraphing for it to every station on the line; in telling several home-truths to the porters at our own station, which—­it being Christmas-time, and they consequently all more or less tipsy—­they have taken with a bland playfulness that he has found a little trying; and, lastly, in writing a long letter to the Times. And I, meanwhile, being easy in my mind on his score, knowing that he is happy, am at leisure to be happy myself.  In company with my brother, I have spent all the little day in decorating the church, making it into a cheerful, green Christmas bower.  We always did it at home.