inner on Christmas Day, and Miss Sherard was coming down for the week,
and whom else would Jane like to ask for Christmas?

Miss Abingdon was a staunch upholder of familiar customs. There was a
certain ritual to be observed during Christmas week, and Miss Abingdon
observed it. She gave handsome presents to her household on Christmas
morning, and she always wept in church on Christmas Day, out of respect
to the memory of an elder sister who had died many years ago, and whom
as a matter of fact Miss Abingdon had never known very intimately, for
she had married and left home when Mary Abingdon was but a child. She
gave tips to bell-ringers and carol-singers, and entertained
Sunday-school children and 'mothers' in the laundry. These
anniversaries, she was wont to remark conscientiously, mitigating the
enjoyment of placing handsome presents beside her guests' breakfast
plates--these anniversaries were full of sadness. And having suffered
fewer bereavements than commonly fall to the lot of most women of her
age, she dutifully thought of her elder sister, whom she vaguely
remembered as an occasional guest at her father's house, and she could
not have enjoyed a Christmas Day sermon in which there was not an
allusion to empty chairs.

After morning service Miss Abingdon walked to the Vicarage and bestowed
her yearly gifts upon the Wrottesley family. It was a matter of
conscience with her to give a present of exactly the same value to Mrs.
Wrottesley as to the canon, and this year she offered her little gifts
with a good deal of compunction, remembering how difficult she had
often found it to be quite fair in the distribution. For Mrs.
Wrottesley was failing in health, and in her own plain, unostentatious
way she had made up her mind that her time for quitting this world was
not very far off. She wrote her will with scrupulous exactness and
justness, and having done so she made no allusion whatever to what must
have been occupying her thoughts to the exclusion of everything else,
but continued to live the life in which care for herself had always
been conspicuously absent.

She received Miss Abingdon and Jane on Christmas Day in her pleasant
drawing-room which the wintry sunshine was flooding with warmth and
joyousness, and she tendered her thanks for the presents which had been
brought for her, assured her inquirers that she was very much better in
health, and said that she had ordered no dinner at home, so that her
h