Not to speak of Christmas!  Christmas in the little house was one wild delirium of joy.  The night before the festival was, to all outward appearances, an ordinary evening, when Uncle Tom sat by the fire in his slippers, as usual, scouting the idea that there would be any Christmas at all.  Aunt Mary sewed, and talked with maddening calmness of the news of the day; but for Honora the air was charged with coming events of the first magnitude.  The very furniture of the little sitting-room had a different air, the room itself wore a mysterious aspect, and the cannel-coal fire seemed to give forth a special quality of unearthly light.

“Is to-morrow Christmas?” Uncle Tom would exclaim.  Bless me!  Honora, I am so glad you reminded me.”

“Now, Uncle Tom, you knew it was Christmas all the time!”

“Kiss your uncle good night, Honora, and go right to sleep, dear,”—­from Aunt Mary.

The unconscious irony in that command of Aunt Mary’s!—­to go right to sleep!  Many times was a head lifted from a small pillow, straining after the meaning of the squeaky noises that came up from below!  Not Santa Claus.  Honora’s belief in him had merged into a blind faith in a larger and even more benevolent, if material providence:  the kind of providence which Mr. Meredith depicts, and which was to say to Beauchamp:  “Here’s your marquise;” a particular providence which, at the proper time, gave Uncle Tom money, and commanded, with a smile, “Buy this for Honora—­she wants it.”  All-sufficient reason!  Soul-satisfying philosophy, to which Honora was to cling for many years of life.  It is amazing how much can be wrung from a reluctant world by the mere belief in this kind of providence.

Sleep came at last, in the darkest of the hours.  And still in the dark hours a stirring, a delicious sensation preceding reason, and the consciousness of a figure stealing about the room.  Honora sat up in bed, shivering with cold and delight.

“Is it awake ye are, darlint, and it but four o’clock the morn!”

“What are you doing, Cathy?”

“Musha, it’s to Mass I’m going, to ask the Mother of God to give ye many happy Christmases the like of this, Miss Honora.”  And Catherine’s arms were about her.

“Oh, it’s Christmas, Cathy, isn’t it?  How could I have forgotten it!”

“Now go to sleep, honey.  Your aunt and uncle wouldn’t like it at all at all if ye was to make noise in the middle of the night—­and it’s little better it is.”

Sleep!  A despised waste of time in childhood.  Catherine went to Mass, and after an eternity, the grey December light began to sift through the shutters, and human endurance had reached its limit.  Honora, still shivering, seized a fleecy wrapper (the handiwork of Aunt Mary) and crept, a diminutive ghost, down the creaking stairway to the sitting-room.  A sitting-room which now was not a sitting-room, but for to-day a place of magic.  As though by a prearranged salute of the gods,—­at Honora’s entrance the fire burst through the thick blanket of fine coal which Uncle Tom had laid before going to bed, and with a little gasp of joy that was almost pain, she paused on the threshold.  That one flash, like Pizarro’s first sunrise over Peru, gilded the edge of infinite possibilities.