Christmas approached nearer and nearer—now it was only four days before Christmas Eve. There was no snow, but frost and a cold, pale blue sky; the town was like a crystallized fruit, hard and glittering and sharply coloured.

The market was open during the whole of Christmas week, and there was the old woman under her umbrella and the fur-coated man with the wooden toys, and the fruit stalls with the holly and mistletoe, and the Punch and Judy under the town clock, where it had been for ever so many years, and the man with the coloured balloons, and the little dogs on wheels that you wound up in the back with a key and they jumped along the cobbles as natural as life.

The children were deeply absorbed over their presents. Mary looked at Jeremy so often from behind her spectacles in a mysterious and ominous way that at last he said:

“All right, Mary, you’ll know me next time.”

“I was wondering,” she said, with a convulsive choke in her throat, “whether you’ll like my present.”

“I expect I will,” he said, busy at the moment with the brushing of Hamlet.

“Because,” she went on, “there were two things, and I couldn’t make up my mind which, and I asked Helen, and she said the first one, because you might have a cold any time and it would be good in the snow; but we don’t have snow here much, so I thought the other would be better, because you do like pictures, don’t you, Jeremy, and sometimes the pictures are lovely—so I got that, and now I don’t know whether you’ll like it.”

Jeremy had no reply to make to this.

“Oh, now you’ve guessed what it is.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Jeremy quite truthfully.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” Mary sighed with relief. “Have you got all your presents?”

“Yes, all of them,” said Jeremy, drawing himself up and gazing with dreamy pride over Hamlet’s head.

“Shall I like mine?” asked Mary, her eyes glistening.

“Awfully,” said Jeremy. “You’ll like it,” he said slowly, “better than anything you’ve ever been given.”

“Better than the writing-case Uncle Samuel gave me?”

“Much better.”

“Oh, Jeremy!” She suddenly flung her arms round his neck and kissed him. Hamlet barked and escaped the brush and comb, then seized Mary’s hair ribbon, that had, as usual, fallen to the floor, and ran with it to a distant corner. Incidents followed that had nothing to do with presents.

Then when Christmas Day grew very near indeed, those parcels at the bottom of his play-box became an obsession. He went up a hundred times a day to look at them, to take them out and stroke them, to feel their knobs and protruding angles, to replace them, first in this way and then in that. Sometimes he laid them all out upon the bed, sometimes he spread them in a long line across the carpet. He brought up Hamlet and made him look at them. Hamlet sniffed each parcel, then wanted to tear the paper wrappings; finally, he lay on the carpet and rattled in his throat, wagging his tail and baring his teeth.

Christmas Eve arrived, a beautiful, clear, frosty day.