er old, with shrubberies
and lawns. It ended the lane in a dead end. Only a field-path trekked
away to the left.

On this particular Christmas Eve Alfred Bricknell had only two of his
children at home. Of the others, one daughter was unhappily married, and
away in India weeping herself thinner; another was nursing her babies in
Streatham. Jim, the hope of the house, and Julia, now married to Robert
Cunningham, had come home for Christmas.

The party was seated in the drawing-room, that the grown-up daughters
had made very fine during their periods of courtship. Its walls were
hung with fine grey canvas, it had a large, silvery grey, silky carpet,
and the furniture was covered with dark green silky material. Into this
reticence pieces of futurism, Omega cushions and Van-Gogh-like pictures
exploded their colours. Such _chic_ would certainly not have been looked
for up Shottle Lane.

The old man sat in his high grey arm-chair very near an enormous coal
fire. In this house there was no coal-rationing. The finest coal was
arranged to obtain a gigantic glow such as a coal-owner may well enjoy,
a great, intense mass of pure red fire. At this fire Alfred Bricknell
toasted his tan, lambs-wool-lined slippers.

He was a large man, wearing a loose grey suit, and sprawling in the
large grey arm-chair. The soft lamp-light fell on his clean, bald,
Michael-Angelo head, across which a few pure hairs glittered. His chin
was sunk on his breast, so that his sparse but strong-haired white
beard, in which every strand stood distinct, like spun glass lithe and
elastic, curved now upwards and inwards, in a curious curve returning
upon him. He seemed to be sunk in stern, prophet-like meditation. As a
matter of fact, he was asleep after a heavy meal.

Across, seated on a pouffe on the other side of the fire, was a
cameo-like girl with neat black hair done tight and bright in the French
mode. She had strangely-drawn eyebrows, and her colour was brilliant.
She was hot, leaning back behind the shaft of old marble of the
mantel-piece, to escape the fire. She wore a simple dress of apple-green
satin, with full sleeves and ample skirt and a tiny bodice of green
cloth. This was Josephine Ford, the girl Jim was engaged to.

Jim Bricknell himself was a tall big fellow of thirty-eight. He sat in
a chair in front of the fire, some distance back, and stretched his long
legs far in front of him. His chin too was sunk on his breast, his young
forehead