AT Christmas Private Hollis was granted forty-eight hours’ leave. He had been a member of the Blackhampton Battalion rather less than three months, but this was a piece of luck for which he felt very grateful.

Those three months had been a grueling time. His age was forty-one, and, in order to comply with the arbitrary limit of thirty-eight imposed by Field Marshal Viscount Partington in the first days of strife, it had been necessary to falsify his age. Many another had done likewise. Questions were not asked, and if a man had physical soundness and the standards of measurement demanded by the noble Viscount there seemed no particular reason why they should be. All the same the sudden and severe change from a soft life found some weak places in Private Hollis.

How he stuck it he hardly knew. Many a time in those trying early weeks he was sorely tempted to go sick with “a pain in his hair.” But ever at the back of his mind hovered the august shade of Troop Sergeant Major William Hollis, the distinguished kinsman who had fought at Waterloo, whose spurs and sword hung in the little back sitting room of Number Five, Love Lane; and that old warrior simply would not countenance any such proceeding. Therefore, Christmas week arrived without Private Hollis having missed a single parade. Although not one of the bright boys of the Battalion, he was not looked upon unfavorably, and on Christmas Eve, about four o’clock, he returned to his home from the neighboring town of Duckingfield.

His home in the course of the sixteen years he had lived in it had brought him precious little in the way of happiness. More than once he had wondered if ever he would be man enough to break its sinister thrall; more than once he had wished to end the ever-growing aversion of man and wife by doing something violent. He had really grown to hate the place. And yet after an absence of less than three months he was returning to it with a thankfulness that was surprising.

All the same he was not sure how Melia would receive him. When at last he had made the great decision and had told her that he was going to join up he had said she must either carry on the business in his absence, or that it could be wound up and she must be content with the separation allowance. Her answer had been a gibe. However, she proposed to carry on in spite of the fact that W. Hollis Fruiterer as a means of livelihood was likely to prove a stone about her neck. Still there was a pretty strong vein of independence in her and if she could keep afloat by her own exertions she meant to do so.

During his three months’ absence in camp their correspondence had been meager; it had also been formal, not to say cold. The estrangement into which they had drifted was so wide that even the step he had recently taken could not bridge it. He had told her on a picture postcard with a view of Duckingfield Parish Church that he was quite well and he hoped that she was and that things were going on all right; and with a view of the Market Place she replied that she was glad to know that he was quite well as it left her at present. However, he was careful to supplement this marital politeness with a few words every Saturday when he sent her five shillings, all he could spare of his pay. The money was always acknowledged briefly and coldly. No clew was given to her feelings, or to her affairs, but when he told her he was coming home at Christmas for two days she wrote to say that she would be pleased to see him.

As he stepped off the tram into the raw Blackhampton mirk which awaited him at the end of Love Lane that formal phrase came rather oddly into his mind. It gave him a sort of consolation to reflect that Melia was one who said what she meant and meant what she said. But, whether or not she would be pleased to see him at the present moment, he was genuinely pleased to be seeing her.

It was strange that it should be so. But Melia with all her grim humors stood for freedom, a life of physical ease and cushioned independence, and this was what a slack fibered man of one and forty simply longed for after three months’ “grueling.” For a man past his physical best, of slothful habits and civilian softness, the hard training had not been child’s play. Besides, his home meant something. It always had meant something. That was why in the face of many difficulties he had struggled in his spasmodic way to keep it together. It had seemed to give him no pleasure, it had seemed to bring nothing into his life, but somehow he had felt that if once he let go of it, as far as he was concerned it would mean the end of all things. He would simply fall to pieces. He would sink into the gutter and he would never be able to rise again.

Getting off the tram at the end of Love Lane he felt a sensation that was almost pride to think that he had a place of his own to come home to. After all it stood for sixteen years of life and struggle. And at that moment he was particularly glad that he had sent that five shillings a week regularly. Unless he had done so he would not now have been able to go and face Melia.

There was not much light in the little street, but it was not yet quite dark. And the first sight of his home gave him a shock. The outside of the shop had changed completely. Not only was the signboard and the rest of the woodwork resplendent with new paint, but the window was more than twice the size it had been. Moreover it was brilliantly lighted; there was a fine display of apples, oranges, prunes, nuts, even boxes of candied fruits and bonbons; and in the center of this amazing picture was a large Christmas tree, artfully decorated, in a pot covered with pink paper.

William Hollis gave a gasp. And then a slow chill spread over him as he realized the truth. Somebody had taken over the business, somebody with capital, brains, business experience. But that being the case why had Melia kept it all so dark? And why, if the business belonged to somebody else, was his name still on the signboard? And why had it had that new coat of paint?

The sheer unexpectedness struck him internally, as if a bucket of water had been dashed in his face. It was the worst set-back he had ever had in his life. Not until that moment did he realize how much the shop meant to him. He was bitterly angry that such a trick had been played. It showed, as hardly anything else could have done, the depth of Melia’s venom; it showed to what a point she was prepared to carry her resentment.

It took him a minute to pull himself together, and then he walked into the shop, not defiantly, not angrily, but with a sense of outrage. There was nobody in it, but, as he cast round one indignant glance at its new and guilty grandeur and then crossed heavily to the curtained door, he held himself ready to meet the new proprietor.

Beyond that mysterious portal the small living room was very spick and span. Almost to his surprise he found Melia there. She matched the room in appearance and at the moment he came in she was putting a log of wood on the fire. Great Uncle William’s sword and accouterments, hanging from the wall, were decorated with holly, the pictures also and a new grocer’s almanac, and a small bunch of mistletoe was suspended from the gas bracket in the middle of the ceiling. Everything was far more cheerful and homelike than he ever remembered to have seen it. The note of Christmas was there, which in itself meant welcome and good cheer.

He stood at the threshold of the curtained door, a neat soldierlike figure with a chastened mustache, looking wonderfully trim and erect in his uniform. She greeted him with a kind of half smile on her hard sad face, but he didn’t offer to kiss her. Not for long years had they been on those terms; they were man and wife in hardly more than name. And if in his absence, as there was reason to suspect, she had played him a trick in revenge for her years of disappointment, he somehow felt man enough at that moment to make an end of things altogether so far as she was concerned. There were faults on both sides, no doubt. Perhaps he hadn’t quite played jannock; but if the business now belonged to somebody else, he would simply walk straight out of the place and he would never enter it again.

She stood looking at him, as if she expected him to speak first. But he didn’t know what to say to her, with that doubt in his mind. Braced by the stern discipline which he felt already had made him so much more a man than he had ever been in his life, he had come home fully prepared to make a fresh start. In spite of her embittered temper, he had not lost quite all his affection for her. He was the kind of man who craves for affection; absence and hardship had made him realize that. He had looked forward to this homecoming, not merely as a relief from the grind of military routine, which galled him at times so that he could hardly bear it, but as an assertion of the manhood, of the husbandhood, that had long been overdue.

“Evenin’, Melia,” he said at last.

“Evenin’, Bill,” as she spoke she dropped her eyes.

“Happy Christmas to you.” Somehow his voice sounded much deeper than ever before.

“Same to you. Bill.” There was almost a softness in the fall of the words that took his mind a long way back.

“How goes it?” Her reception was thawing him a little in spite of himself, but he hesitated about taking off his overcoat. If this fair seeming was intended to mask a blow there was only one way to meet it. There was a pause and then he took the plunge. “Business good?” He held himself ready for the consequences.

“Pretty fair.” The tone told nothing.

“Seems to be that,” he said mordantly. “Had a coat o’ paint, I see, outside.” He steeled himself again. “Had a new window put in an’ all.”

She nodded.

“How did you manage it?” Again the plunge.

“Got a new landlord.”

Ha! they were coming to it now. He held himself tensely. “Old Whatmore gone up the spout or something?” He remembered that some time back there had been rumors of an impending bankruptcy on the part of Whatmore the builder.

“No, Whatmore’s all right, but he’s sold this shop and the whole row with it.”

“Sold it, eh?” His excitement was so great that in spite of a cool military air it was impossible to disguise it. All the same she waited for him to ask the all-important question, but he was slow to do so.

“Who’s bought it?” he said at last.

“Father’s bought it.” She did her best to speak quite casually, but she didn’t succeed.

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