“Turn me out!” and she laughed harshly.  “Turn me out!  Send for the police to do it, if you like.”

Max went out of the barn, listening to her cackling laugh, and not feeling comfortable until he had found his way into the open air.  He at once gave orders to the stablemen and gardeners to search the barn and to turn out the strangers they might find there.

But though they hunted in every corner, they found no one, and Max was only too glad to come to the conclusion that Mrs. Higgs had taken his advice, and got away with as little delay as possible.

This incident, however, following so closely on the heels of his experiences at the wharf, took away all the zest with which Max should have entered into the programme which, by Mr. Wedmore’s special wish, had been prepared for that evening; and while Doreen and Queenie and Mildred Appleby and two young nephews of Mr. Wedmore’s chattered and laughed, and made dinner a very lively affair, Max was quiet and what his cousins called “grumpy,” and threatened to be a wet blanket on the evening’s entertainment.

“Going to have all the servants in to dance Sir Roger!” cried he, in dismay, when Doreen told him the news.  “Good heavens!  Hasn’t he had a lesson in yesterday’s tomfoolery and what came of it?  How do the servants like the idea?”

“Of course they hate it,” answered Doreen, “and mamma has been all day trying to coax the cook to indulge him, and not to walk off and leave us to cook the Christmas dinner.  And, of course, this assurance that the notion was distasteful to everybody had made papa more obstinate than ever.  Oh, we shall have a merry time.”

Now, down in the depths of his heart Mr. Wedmore had begun to feel some misgivings about his plans for keeping Christmas in the good old fashion.  But the first failure, the colossal mistake of the Yule Log, had made him obstinate instead of yielding, and he had set his teeth and made up his mind that they should all be merry in the way he chose, or they should not be merry at all.

The fact was that this prosaic middle-aged gentleman, who had passed the greater part of his life immersed in day-books and ledgers and the details of a busy city man’s life, found time hang heavy on his hands in these prosperous days of his retirement, and in this condition he had had his mind inflamed by pictures of the life that was led in The Beeches by his forerunners, easy-going, hard-riding, hard-drinking country gentlemen, with whom, if the truth were known, he had nothing in common.

Fired by the desire to live the life they led, to enjoy it in the pleasant old fashion, it had seemed to him an especially happy custom to give a dance at which masters and servants should join hands and make merry together.  He had never assisted at one of these balls, and he refused to listen to his wife’s suggestion that it should take place in the servants’ hall, that the servants should be allowed to invite their own friends, and that the family should limit itself to one brief dance with their dependants and then leave them to enjoy themselves in their own way.