New Year’s Day, among the English, is associated with the giving and receiving of dinners, and with nothing more.  New Year’s Day, among the foreigners, is the grand opportunity of the year for the giving and receiving of presents.  It is occasionally possible to acclimatise a foreign custom.  In this instance Vendale felt no hesitation about making the attempt.  His one difficulty was to decide what his New Year’s gift to Marguerite should be.  The defensive pride of the peasant’s daughter—­morbidly sensitive to the inequality between her social position and his—­would be secretly roused against him if he ventured on a rich offering.  A gift, which a poor man’s purse might purchase, was the one gift that could be trusted to find its way to her heart, for the giver’s sake.  Stoutly resisting temptation, in the form of diamonds and rubies, Vendale bought a brooch of the filagree-work of Genoa—­the simplest and most unpretending ornament that he could find in the jeweller’s shop.

He slipped his gift into Marguerite’s hand as she held it out to welcome him on the day of the dinner.

“This is your first New Year’s Day in England,” he said.  “Will you let me help to make it like a New Year’s Day at home?”

She thanked him, a little constrainedly, as she looked at the jeweller’s box, uncertain what it might contain.  Opening the box, and discovering the studiously simple form under which Vendale’s little keepsake offered itself to her, she penetrated his motive on the spot.  Her face turned on him brightly, with a look which said, “I own you have pleased and flattered me.”  Never had she been so charming, in Vendale’s eyes, as she was at that moment.  Her winter dress—­a petticoat of dark silk, with a bodice of black velvet rising to her neck, and enclosing it softly in a little circle of swansdown—­heightened, by all the force of contrast, the dazzling fairness of her hair and her complexion.  It was only when she turned aside from him to the glass, and, taking out the brooch that she wore, put his New Year’s gift in its place, that Vendale’s attention wandered far enough away from her to discover the presence of other persons in the room.  He now became conscious that the hands of Obenreizer were affectionately in possession of his elbows.  He now heard the voice of Obenreizer thanking him for his attention to Marguerite, with the faintest possible ring of mockery in its tone. ("Such a simple present, dear sir! and showing such nice tact!”) He now discovered, for the first time, that there was one other guest, and but one, besides himself, whom Obenreizer presented as a compatriot and friend.  The friend’s face was mouldy, and the friend’s figure was fat.  His age was suggestive of the autumnal period of human life.  In the course of the evening he developed two extraordinary capacities.  One was a capacity for silence; the other was a capacity for emptying bottles.