For the little volume, even at this first quick glimpse, was stamped with something fiery and strange.  Martie’s eyes drifted here and there; presently fell upon the lines that brought the frightened little Italian princess, fresh from her convent, to the strange coast of England, and to the welcome of the strange King, her prospective husband’s brother.  The words were simplicity’s self, like all inspired words, yet they brought the colour to Martie’s face, and a yearning pain to her heart.  Youth and love in all their first gold glory were captured here, and something of youth and glory seemed to flood the Library throughout the quiet winter afternoon.

The hours droned on, Martie, moving noiselessly about, and touching the switch that suddenly lighted the dim big room, paused at the window to look down upon Monroe.  An early twilight was creeping into the village street, and the drug-store windows glowed with globes of purple and green.  The shops were already disguised under bushy evergreens; wreaths of red and green paper made circles of steam against the show windows.  Silva, of the fruit market opposite, was selling a Christmas tree from the score that lay at the curb, to a stout country woman, whose shabby, well-wrapped children watched the transaction breathlessly from a mud-spattered surrey.  The Baxter girls went by, Martie saw them turn into the church yard, and disappear into the swinging black doors, “for a little visit.”

Nothing dramatic or beautiful in the scene:  a little Western village street, on the eve of Christmas Eve, but to-night it was lighted for Martie with poetry and romance.  The thought of a slim, dark-blue book with its four magic lines thrilled in her heart like a song.

“Christmas day after to-morrow!” she said to Fanny, “don’t you love Christmas?”

But she knew that her real Christmas joy had come to-day.

The December kitchen was gas-lighted long before she got there, and Pauline was deep in calm preparation for dinner.  Pauline was a Canadian girl, and if her work ever confused or fatigued her, at least she never betrayed the fact.  There never were pots and pans awaiting cleaning in Pauline’s sink, there never was a teaspoonful of flour spilled upon her biscuit board.  Her gingham cuffs were always starched and stiff, her colourless hair smooth.  She was a silent, dun-coloured creature, whose most violent expression was an occasional deep, unctuous laugh at Mrs. Bannister’s nonsense.

Pauline did not prepare a meal in a series of culminating convulsions, with hair rumpling, face reddening, and voice rising every passing minute.  She moved a shining pot forward on a shining stove, she took plates of inviting cold things from the safe, and lifted a damp napkin from her pats of butter.  Then she said, in an uninterested voice:  “You might tell your p’pa, Miss Lydia—­”