So telling myself he must be back by this time on that lonely plateau that guards the Pole, I resolved (without thinking of the difference of time) to go to mass on Christmas morning, in order to be doing the same thing as Martin at the same moment.
With this in my mind I returned to our boarding-house and found Christmas there too, for on looking into the drawing-room on my way upstairs I saw the old actress, standing on a chair, hanging holly which the old colonel with old-fashioned courtesy was handing up to her.
They were cackling away like two old hens when they caught sight of me, whereupon the old actress cried:
"Ah, here's Beauty!"
Then she asked me if I would like a ticket for a dress rehearsal on Christmas Eve of a Christmas pantomime.
"The audience will be chiefly children out of the lanes and alleys round about, but perhaps you won't mind that," she said.
I told her I should be overjoyed, and at two o'clock the following afternoon I was in my seat at the corner of the dress-circle of the great theatre, from which I could see both the stage and the auditorium.
The vast place was packed with children from ceiling to floor, and I could see the invisible hands of thousands of mothers who had put the girls into clean pinafores and brushed and oiled the tousled heads of the boys.
How their eager faces glistened! How sad they looked when the wicked sisters left Cinderella alone in the kitchen! How bright when the glittering fairy godmother came to visit her! How their little dangling feet clapped together with joy when the pretty maid went off to the ball behind six little ponies which pranced along under the magical moonlight in the falling snow!
But the part of the performance which they liked best was their own part when, in the interval, the band struck up one of the songs they sang in their lanes and alleys: