Up to this moment she had been thinking that it could not be possible for any one to have a happier Christmas than she was having.  A dozen times she had smoothed the soft fur of her boa with a caressing hand, and slipped back her glove to delight her eyes with the sight of her bloodstone ring, while her thoughts ran on ahead to the house-party towards which they were speeding.  But the old lady’s words had opened up a vista that set her to day-dreaming.

If by the road or by the hill or by the far seaway “he” should really come, some day, then of course the Christmases they would spend together would be happier than this.  Jack had always said that she would have her “innings” when she was a grandmother.  All her life Mary had been dreaming romances about other people, now in a vague sweet way those dreams began to centre around herself.

It was almost dark when they left the train.  Phil was at the station to meet them with a sleigh and a team of spirited black horses.

“Oh, sleighbells!” sighed Joyce, ecstatically, as she climbed into the back seat beside Betty.  “I haven’t been behind any since I left Plainsville.  I wish we had forty miles to go.  Nothing makes me feel so larky as the sound of sleighbells.”

Phil glanced back over his shoulder.  “It is a bare mile and a half to the house, but I told Eugenia I’d bring you home the roundabout way to make the drive longer, if you all were not cold.  What do you say?”

“The long way by all means!” cried Joyce and Betty in the same breath.

Phil laughed.  “The ayes have it.  Even Mary’s eyes, although she doesn’t say anything,” he added, seeing the beaming smile that crossed her face at the prospect of a longer drive.  “They are shining like two stars,” he went on mischievously, amused to see the colour flame up into her cheeks, and noticing how becoming it was.  Then his mettlesome horses claimed his attention for awhile.

Later, as he looked back from time to time, in conversation with the older girls, his glance rested on Mary, sitting beside him as contented and happy as a kitten in those becoming furs, and he thought with satisfaction that the little Vicar was growing up to be a very pretty girl after all.  Her eyes were positively starry under her long, curling lashes.

That Eugenia regarded their coming as a great event, they felt from the moment the sleigh drew up to the house.  From every window streamed a welcoming light, and the front door, flung open at their approach, showed that the wide reception hall had been transformed into a bower of Christmas greens.  Eugenia, radiant in her most becoming dinner gown of holly red, came running down the steps to meet them.

Ever since she had been established as mistress of this beautiful country place, she had longed for them to visit her.  Guests she had in plenty, for young Doctor Tremont and his wife were noted for their lavish hospitality, but the welcome accorded her new friends and neighbours was nothing to the one reserved for these old friends of her girlhood.  She wanted them to see for themselves that she had made no mistake in her weaving, and that marriage had indeed brought her the “diamond leaf” that Abdallah found only in Paradise.