Valerie, finding several boxes of twisted wire icicles, began to attach them to the tree, saying at intervals: ‘Oh, look! it really is rather sweet, isn’t it? Oh, I say, here’s a place with absolutely nothing on it!’

Joseph, it was plain to see, was in the seventh heaven of delight. He beamed triumphantly at Mathilda, rubbed his hands together, and trotted round and round the tree, extravagantly admiring everybody’s handiwork, and picking up the rickety steps whenever they fell over, which they frequently did. Towards teatime, Maud came in, and said that it looked quite a picture, and she had never realised that the Empress was a cousin of Ludwig of Bavaria, the mad one who had Wagner to stay, and behaved in such a peculiar, though rather touching, way.

Paula, who, after an abortive attempt to discuss with Mathilda the probable duration of Nathaniel’s life, had bearded her uncle in his study, interrupting him in the middle of a business talk with Mottisfont, joined the Christmas-tree party midway through the afternoon in a mood of glowering bad temper. Apart from making a number of destructive criticisms, she offered no help with the decorations, but walked about the room, smoking, and arguing that, since Nathaniel meant to leave her money in his will, she might just as well have it before he was dead. No one paid much attention to this, except Mathilda, who advised her not to count her chickens before they were hatched.

‘Well, they are hatched!’ said Paula crossly. ‘Uncle told me he was leaving me quite a lot of money, ages ago. It isn’t as though I wanted it all now: I don’t. A couple of thousand would be ample, and after all, what are a couple of thousand pounds to Uncle Nat?’

Roydon, who presumably found this open discussion embarrassing, turned a dull red, and pretended to be busy fitting candles into their holders.

But nothing could stop Paula. She went on striding about the room, and maintaining a singularly boring monologue, which only Joseph listened to. He, trying to pour oil on troubled waters, said that he knew just how she felt, and well recalled his own sensations on a somewhat similar occasion, when he was billed to appear as Macbeth, in Melbourne.

‘Go on, Joe! You never played Macbeth!’ said Mathilda.

Joseph took this in very good part, but insisted that he had played all the great tragic rôles. It was a pity that he had not observed his wife’s entry into the room before he made this boast, because Mathilda at once called upon her to deny so palpable a lie.

‘I don’t remember his ever appearing as Macbeth,’ said Maud, in her placid way. ‘But he was very good in character-parts, very good indeed.’

Everyone immediately saw Joseph as the First Gravedigger, and even Paula’s lips quivered. Maud, quite unconscious of the impression she was making, began to recall the various minor rôles in which Joseph had appeared to advantage, and threw out a vague promise of looking out a book of press-cuttings, which she had put away somewhere.