ed, and I heard my father's
loud voice asking the singers into the house.

They came in, and when I was back in bed, I heard them talking and then
laughing in the room below, with Aunt Bridget louder than all the rest,
and when I asked what she was doing my mother told me she was serving
out bunloaf and sherry-wine.

I fell asleep before the incident was over, but as soon as I awoke in
the morning I conceived the idea of singing the Waits myself. Being an
artful little thing I knew that my plan would be opposed, so I said
nothing about it, but I got my mother to play and sing the carol I had
heard overnight, until my quick ear had mastered both tune and words,
and when darkness fell on Christmas night I proceeded to carry out my
intention.

In the heat of my impatience I forgot to put on cloak or hat, and
stealing out of the house I found myself in the carriage drive with
nothing on but a pair of thin slippers and the velvet frock that left my
neck and arms so bare. It was snowing, and the snow-flakes were whirling
round me and making me dizzy, for in the light from my mother's window
they seemed to come up from the ground as well as down from the sky.

When I got out of the light of the window, it was very dark, and I could
only see that the chestnuts in the drive seemed to have white blankets
on them which looked as if they had been hung out to dry. It was a long
time before I got to the gate, and then I had begun to be nervous and to
have half a mind to turn back. But the thought of the bunloaf and the
sherry-wine buoyed me up, and presently I found myself on the high road,
crossing a bridge and turning down a lane that led to the sea, whose
moaning a mile away was the only sound I could hear.

I knew quite well where I was going to. I was going to the doctor's
house. It was called Sunny Lodge, and it was on the edge of Yellow Gorse
Farm. I had seen it more than once when I had driven out in the carriage
with my mother, and had thought how sweet it looked with its whitewashed
walls and brown thatched roof and the red and white roses which grew
over the porch.

I was fearfully cold before I got there. The snow was in my slippers and
down my neck and among the thickening masses of my hair. At one moment I
came upon some sheep and lambs that were sheltering under a hedge, and
they bleated in the silence of the night.

But at last I saw the warm red windows of the doctor's cottage, and
coming to the wicket gate,