Presently the automobile, after speeding up the asphalt of Grant Avenue, stopped before the new house.  In spite of the change that house had made in my life, in three weeks I had become amazingly used to it; yet I had an odd feeling that Christmas eve as I stood under the portico with my key in the door, the same feeling of the impersonality of the place which I had experienced before.  Not that for one moment I would have exchanged it for the smaller house we had left.  I opened the door.  How often, in that other house, I had come in the evening seeking quiet, my brain occupied with a problem, only to be annoyed by the romping of the children on the landing above.  A noise in one end of it echoed to the other.  But here, as I entered the hall, all was quiet:  a dignified, deep-carpeted stairway swept upward before me, and on either side were wide, empty rooms; and in the subdued light of one of them I saw a dark figure moving silently about—­the butler.  He came forward to relieve me, deftly, of my hat and overcoat.  Well, I had it at last, this establishment to which I had for so long looked forward.  And yet that evening, as I hesitated in the hall, I somehow was unable to grasp that it was real and permanent, the very solidity of the walls and doors paradoxically suggested transientness, the butler a flitting ghost.  How still the place was!  Almost oppressively still.  I recalled oddly a story of a peasant who, yearning for the great life, had stumbled upon an empty palace, its tables set with food in golden dishes.  Before two days had passed he had fled from it in horror back to his crowded cottage and his drudgery in the fields.  Never once had the sense of possession of the palace been realized.  Nor did I feel that I possessed this house, though I had the deeds of it in my safe and the receipted bills in my files.  It eluded me; seemed, in my, bizarre mood of that evening, almost to mock me.  “You have built me,” it seemed to say, “but I am stronger than you, because you have not earned me.”  Ridiculous, when the years of my labour and the size of my bank account were considered!  Such, however, is the verbal expression of my feeling.  Was the house empty, after all?  Had something happened?  With a slight panicky sensation I climbed the stairs, with their endless shallow treads, to hurry through the silent hallway to the schoolroom.  Reassuring noises came faintly through the heavy door.  I opened it.  Little Biddy was careening round and round, crying out:—­“To-morrow’s Chris’mas!  Santa Claus is coming tonight.”

Matthew was regarding her indulgently, sympathetically, Moreton rather scornfully.  The myth had been exploded for both, but Matthew still hugged it.  That was the difference between them.  Maude, seated on the floor, perceived me first, and glanced up at me with a smile.

“It’s father!” she said.

Biddy stopped in the midst of a pirouette.  At the age of seven she was still shy with me, and retreated towards Maude.