h I never dreamed they would be
utilized quite so literally. Of course it _was_ yesterday?"

"Yes," nodded Trix again. And then with a huge sigh, "Oh, Pia, I am so
happy."

Pia turned her round towards Miss Tibbutt.

"Tibby, look at her face, and then she tells us she is happy, as though
it were necessary to advertise the fact to our slow intelligences."

Trix laughed, though the tears were in her eyes. Laughter and tears are
amazingly close together at times.

"And is it quite necessary to walk to Byestry this morning?" teased Pia.
"He will probably be on his rounds, you know."

Again Trix laughed, this time without the tears.

"I am not proposing to sit in his pocket," she remarked. "He did not
happen to suggest that I should, and it certainly never occurred to me to
suggest it."

CHAPTER XXXIII

TRIX SEEKS ADVICE

Trix walked along the road from Woodleigh to Byestry in infinitely too
happy a state of mind to think consistently of any one thing. She did not
even think precisely definitely of the man who had caused this happiness.
She knew only that the happiness was there.

The hoar frost still lay thickly on the hedges and the grass by the
roadside. The frost finger had outlined the twigs, the blades of grass,
the veins of dried leaves with the delicate precision nature alone can
achieve. At one spot a tiny rivulet, arrested by the ice-king in its
course from a field and down a bank, hung in long glistening icicles from
jutting stones and frozen earth. Now and again her own footfall struck
sharp and metallic on the hard road. The sky was cloudless, a clear, cold
blue. A robin trilled its sweet, sad song to her from a frosted bough.

It was all amazingly like a frosted Christmas card, thought Trix, those
Christmas cards her soul had adored in her childish days, and yet which,
oddly enough, always brought with them a sentimental touch of sadness.
Many things had brought this odd happy sadness to Trix as a child,--the
sound of church bells across water, fire-light gleaming in the darkness
from the uncurtained windows of some house, the moon shining on snow, a
solitary tree backgrounded by a grey sky, or a flight of rooks at
sunset.

It was a quarter to eleven or thereabouts when she reached Byestry, and
she made her way at once to the little white-washed, thatched presbytery,
separated from the road by a small front garden.

Trix walked up the path, and rang the bell. Father Dormer was at home,