the church-door, promising to meet her as she came out. Phosy sighed
from relief as she entered, for she had a vague idea that by going to
church to pray for it she might move the Lord to chasten her. At least
he would see her there, and might think of it. She had never had such
an attention from her father before, never such dignity conferred upon
her as to be allowed to appear in church alone, sitting in the pew by
herself like a grown damsel. But I doubt if there was any pride in her
stately step, or any vanity in the smile--no, not smile, but
illuminated mist, the vapour of smiles, which haunted her sweet little
solemn church-window of a face, as she walked up the aisle.

The preacher was one of whom she had never heard her father speak
slighting word, in whom her unbounded trust had never been shaken.
Also he was one who believed with his whole soul in the things that
make Christmas precious. To him the birth of the wonderful baby hinted
at hundreds of strange things in the economy of the planet. That a man
could so thoroughly persuade himself that, he believed the old fable,
was matter of marvel to some of his friends who held blind Nature the
eternal mother, and Night the everlasting grandmother of all things.
But the child Phosy, in her dreams or out of them, in church or
nursery, with her book or her doll, was never out of the region of
wonders, and would have believed, or tried to believe, anything that
did not involve a moral impossibility.

What the preacher said I need not even partially repeat; it is enough
to mention a certain metamorphosed deposit from the stream of his
eloquence carried home in her mind by Phosy: from some of his sayings
about the birth of Jesus into the world, into the family, into the
individual human bosom, she had got it into her head that Christmas
Day was not a birthday like that she had herself last year, but that,