She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and the gate soon opened.  Before going in, she gave him one last, wide, wondering look, as if she would have asked him with imploring emphasis:  ‘O! don’t you understand?’ And out of that look he vanished from her view.

CHAPTER XIV—­WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?

Christmas Eve in Cloisterham.  A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile.  To these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time.  To such as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen from the elm-trees in the Close:  so have the rustling sounds and fresh scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing close together.

Seasonable tokens are about.  Red berries shine here and there in the lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and Chapter.  Lavish profusion is in the shops:  particularly in the articles of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar.  An unusual air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—­such a very poor little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake or a Forty-eighth Cake—­to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one shilling per member.  Public amusements are not wanting.  The Wax-Work which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre:  the latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying ’How do you do to-morrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as miserably.  In short, Cloisterham is up and doing:  though from this description the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded.  From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every one of them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the windows of the latter.  It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.