"Fanks!" replied Sonny with honest dignity, "but I'se gotted my plesy already. She's give-ded me the polly--be-tos it 'oves me dearly."
Kate answered her husband's look with a half-apology. "He means the cockatoo. I thought you wouldn't mind, because it was so dreadfully noisy. And it never screams at him. Sonny! give Polly an apple and show Major Erlton how it loves you."
The child, nothing loth to show off, chose one from the heap and went over fearlessly to the vicious bird; the servants pausing to look admiringly. The cockatoo seized it eagerly, but only as a means to draw the little fellow's arm within reach of its clambering feet. The next moment it was on the narrow shoulder dipping and sidling among the golden curls.
"See how it 'oves me," cried Sonny, his face all smiles.
Major Erlton laughed good-temperedly at the pretty sight and went in to breakfast.
Then the dog-cart came round. It was the same one in which the Major had been used to drive Alice Gissing. But this Christmas morning he had forgotten the fact, as he drove Kate instead, with Sonny, who was to be taken to church as a great treat, crushing the flounces of her pretty dress.
Yet the fresh wind blew in their faces keenly, and the Major, pointing with his whip to the scudding squirrels, said, "Jolly little beasts, aren't they, Kate," just as he had said it to Alice Gissing. What is more, she replied that it was jolly altogether, with much the same enjoyment of the mere present as the other little lady had done. For the larger part of life is normal, common to all.
So they sped past the rocks and trees swiftly, down and down, till with a rumble they were on the draw-bridge, through the massive arch of the Cashmere gate, into the square of the main-guard. The last clang of the church bell seemed to come from the trees overhanging it, and in the ensuing silence a sharp click of the whip sounded like a pistol crack. The mare sped faster through the wooden gate into the open. To the left the Court House showed among tall trees, to the right Skinner's House. Straight ahead, down the road to the Calcutta gate and the boat bridge, stood the College, the telegraph office, a dozen or so of bungalows in gardens, and the magazine shouldering the old cemetery. Quite a colony of Western ways and works within the city wall, clinging to it between the water-bastion and the Calcutta gate.
Close at hand in a central plot of garden, circled by roads, was the church, built after the design of St. Paul's; obtrusively Occidental, crowned by a very large cross.
As the mare drew up among the other carriages, the first notes of the Christmas hymn pealed out among the roses and the pointsettias, the glare and the green. Not a Christmas environment; but the festival brings its own atmosphere with it to most people, and Major Erlton, admiring his wife's rapt face, remembered his own boyhood as he sang a rumbling Gregorian bass of two tones and a semi-tone: