Chapter II.

Church.


Adela did not make her appearance at the breakfast-table next morning,
although it was the morning of Christmas Day. And no one who had seen
her at dinner on Christmas Eve, would have expected to see her at
breakfast on Christmas-morn. Yet although her absence was rather a
relief, such a gloom occupied her place, that our party was anything
but cheerful. But the world about us was happy enough, not merely at
its unseen heart of fire, but on its wintered countenance--evidently
to all men. It was not "to hide her guilty front," as Milton says, in
the first two--and the least worthy--stanzas on the Nativity, that the
earth wooed the gentle air for innocent snow, but to put on the best
smile and the loveliest dress that the cold time and her suffering
state would allow, in welcome of the Lord of the snow and the
summer. I thought of the lines from Crashaw's _Hymn of the
Nativity_--Crashaw, who always suggested to me Shelley turned a
Catholic Priest:

"I saw the curled drops, soft and slow,
Come hovering o'er the place's head,
Offering their whitest sheets of snow,
To furnish the fair infant's bed.
Forbear, said I, be not too bold:
Your fleece is white, but 'tis too cold."