en and Mr. Lasher had been friends at Cambridge and had not met one
another since, and every one knows that that is a dangerous basis for
the renewal of friendship. They had a little dispute on the very
afternoon of Mr. Pidgen's arrival, when Mr. Lasher asked his guest
whether he played golf.

"God preserve my soul! No!" said Mr. Pidgen. Mr. Lasher then explained
that playing golf made one thin, hungry and self-restrained. Mr. Pidgen
said that he did not wish to be the first or last of these, and that he
was always the second, and that golf was turning the fair places of
England into troughs for the moneyed pigs of the Stock Exchange to swill
in.

"My dear Pidgen!" cried Mr. Lasher, "I'm afraid no one could call me a
moneyed pig with any justice--more's the pity--and a game of golf to me
is----"

"Ah! you're a parson, Lasher," said his guest.

In fact, by the evening of the second day of the visit it was obvious
that Clinton St. Mary Vicarage might, very possibly, witness a disturbed
Christmas. It was all very tiresome for poor Mrs. Lasher. On the late
afternoon of Christmas Eve, Hugh heard the stormy conversation that
follows--a conversation that altered the colour and texture of his
after-life as such things may, when one is still a child.

IV

Christmas Eve was always, to Hugh, a day with glamour. He did not any
longer hang up his stocking (although he would greatly have liked to do
so), but, all day, his heart beat thickly at the thought of the morrow,
at the thought of something more than the giving and receiving of
presents, something more than the eating of food, something more than
singing hymns that were delightfully familiar, something more than
putting holly over the pictures and hanging mistletoe on to the lamp in
the hall. Something there was in the day like going home, like meeting
people again whom one had loved once, and not seen for many years,
something as warm and romantic and lightly coloured _and_ as comforting
as the most inspired and impossible story that one could ever, lying in
bed and waiting for sleep, invent.

To-day there was no snow but a frost, and there was a long bar of
saffron below the cold sky and a round red ball of a sun. Hugh was
sitting in a corner of Mr. Lasher's study, looking at Dor