FOOTNOTES:
[5] Tennyson.
CHAPTER IX
The sacred season of Christmas was approaching and Charlie Fitzgerald had returned.
He had not been lucky at Monte Carlo. I do not only mean in the favourite amusement of that place, which he had indulged in for no more than the first day of his visit, for his means were restricted, but also in the weather and the company he found. For the anniversary of the Birth of Christ had drawn from the Riviera to their respective homes many in that cultured cosmopolitan world which held the most intimate of his friends.
He returned, therefore, to The Plâs not in ill humour—that he could never show—but a little sobered and now and then a little sad. When Mr. Clutterbuck exposed to him in full the action he had seen fit to take, no one could have been more sympathetic than he.
"It was a large thing to do, Clutterbuck," he said as they strolled round the garden arm in arm, "but I think it was a wise one."