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.

Needless to enumerate them. The whole world, as we know, was in a
conspiracy to spoil Honora. The