John went to bed in his old room at the vicarage protesting that he had enjoyed the first day of his holiday immensely.  As he blew out the light, he thought suddenly how often in that very room he had gone to bed dreaming about the lady in black and composing verses to her, till somehow the Greek terminations would get mixed up with the Latin roots, the quantities all seemed to change places, and he used to fall asleep with a delicious half romantic sense of happiness always unfulfilled yet always present.  And now at last it began to be fulfilled in earnest; he had met the lady in black at last, had spent nearly half a day in her company and was more persuaded than ever that she was really and truly his ideal.  He did not go to sleep so soon as in the old days, and he was sorry to go to sleep at all; he wanted to enjoy all his delicious recollections of that afternoon before he slept and, as he recapitulated the events which had befallen him and recalled each expression of the face that had charmed him and every intonation of the charmer’s voice, he felt that he had never been really happy before, that no amount of success at Cambridge could give him half the delight he had experienced during one hour in the old Billingsfield church, and that altogether life anywhere else was not worth living.  To-morrow he would see Mrs. Goddard again, and the next day and the day after that and then—­“bother the future!” ejaculated John, and went to sleep.

He awoke early, roused by the loud clanging of the Christmas bells, and looking out he saw that the day was fine and cold and bright as Christmas day should be, and generally is.  The hoar frost was frozen into fantastic shapes upon his little window, the snow was clinging to the yew branches outside and the robins were hopping and chirping over the thin crust of frozen snow that just covered the ground.  The road was hard and brown as on the previous day, and the ice in the park would probably bear.  Perhaps Mrs. Goddard would skate in the afternoon between the services, but then—­Juxon would be there.  “Never mind Juxon,” quoth John to himself, “it is Christmas day!”

At the vicarage and elsewhere, all over the land, those things were done which delight the heart of Englishmen at the merry season.  Everybody shook hands with everybody else, everybody cried “Merry Christmas!” to his neighbour in the street, with an intonation as though he were saying something startlingly new and brilliant which had never been said before.  Every labourer who had a new smock-frock put it on, and those who had none had at least a bit of new red worsted comforter about their throats and began the day by standing at their doors in the cold morning, smoking a “ha’p’orth o’ shag” in a new clay pipe, greeting each other across the village street.  Muggins, who had spent a portion of the night in exchanging affectionate Christmas wishes with the tombstones in the churchyard, appeared fresh and ruddy at an early hour, clad in