“Ah,” rejoined John Foyle, “surprises, be they?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Sibley, “they do look for ’em reg’lar, they do. I do always fill their stockin’s wi’ ’em every Christmas.”
“Oh,” said the sexton, “put their surprises in their stockin’s, do ’ee?”
Mrs. Sibley nodded and withdrew, leaving John sunk in profound thought.
“This ’ere be a vale o’ tears,” he remarked presently, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. He rose, went to the table, turned up the lamp a little more, and fetching pen, ink and paper from the window-sill on which they usually reposed, sat down to indite a letter. It cost him much labour and thought, but, after all, it was a brief enough document. When completed it ran thus: “If Mrs. Sibley will meet Mr. Foyle in the churchyard to-morrow morning about nine o’clock when nobody’s about she will hear of something to your advantage. Yours truly, John Foyle.”
“I couldn’t,” said the sexton to himself, “put the question in any sort of public way. The childern is in and out, and the neighbours mid pop in. The churchyard is best and most nat’ral.”
He folded the letter, put it in an envelope, and addressed it; then, looking round, descried hanging over a chair-back one of Mrs. Sibley’s stockings—the fellow to the one she had lent little Rosanna.
“The very thing!” exclaimed John. “The Christmas surprises do always go in stockin’s. It’ll be a surprise for she, I d’ ’low—not but what she didn’t look for it,” he added with a grim chuckle.
He placed the letter in the stocking, fastened it securely with a loop of string, and, going cautiously upstairs, slung it over Mrs. Sibley’s door-handle. He paused a moment, winking to himself, and then made his way on tiptoe to his own room.
The usual Christmas bustle and excitement prevailed in the little household next morning. The children ecstatically compared notes over their fruit and toys; the sexton himself was quite unaccountably jovial, with a nervous kind of joviality nevertheless, hardly venturing to glance in Mrs. Sibley’s direction. She, on her side, wore a sedate, not to say chastened, aspect, and was attired in her deepest “weeds”.