Dickens’s dialogue—or this interpretation of it—flew past her like a familiar song, allowing her to just drink him in. A dangerous prospect. If this was a dream, she’d dream something stupid like falling into his arms, and if this was real, she’d endanger her heart. And then probably stupidly fall into his arms.

Unable to speak during the performance, a hurricane swirled inside her. Remnants of her feelings for him yesterday swirled with her anger at not being able to fight them off well enough.

At the end of their scene, Susan took the oversized bag of gold coins and rushed off, leaving Scrooge and Belle—Clark, who had somehow made his way down to street level, and Kate—very much alone, but that didn’t break his concentration.

“I must go see the charitable gentleman. And Fred and his wife. Oh, thank you, Spirits!”

Apparently, these were cues of their own as out of nowhere, Doctor Joe Bennett appeared, dressed as the charitable gentleman Scrooge denies a donation earlier in the book. In real life, Joe played this role every year as a bit of a charitable scheme in and of itself. As the Chief Physician of the county’s charity hospital, the festival always donated a little something to the cause. But when Clark approached him and shook his hand, he did not pull out one of the phony-baloney bank notes used during the regular festival. Clark instead handed the man a very real-looking check, and the man’s shock wasn’t the well-rehearsed expression he used every year during this big moment in the narrative.

“Hey, man…”

The line was most definitely, Lord bless me! Yet another clue the check in Clark’s hand was real.

“And not a penny less. I owe you many, many back-payments, and this is just the beginning.”

Doctor Bennett rooted himself to the spot, jaw nearly scraping the floor, while Clark-as-Scrooge hummed to himself and scooped up several brightly wrapped presents on his way down the slowly filling street towards Fred’s house. Familiar faces of the town started to mill about in their costumes, just as they would any other Christmas morning. As if this all were very normal indeed. Without the slightest clue what else to do (she thought she might need to stay and give the doctor a dose of oxygen to combat the symptoms of his shock, or at least stick around long enough to see if the check really was real and how much it was made out for, but ultimately decided against it because she didn’t want to get stuck taking care of a fussy doctor type), Kate followed them.