It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own
words, he had a rotten Christmas.
FOREWARNED
Alethia Debchance sat in a corner of an otherwise empty railway carriage,
more or less at ease as regarded body, but in some trepidation as to
mind. She had embarked on a social adventure of no little magnitude as
compared with the accustomed seclusion and stagnation of her past life.
At the age of twenty-eight she could look back on nothing more eventful
than the daily round of her existence in her aunt's house at
Webblehinton, a hamlet four and a half miles distant from a country town
and about a quarter of a century removed from modern times. Their
neighbours had been elderly and few, not much given to social
intercourse, but helpful or politely sympathetic in times of illness.
Newspapers of the ordinary kind were a rarity; those that Alethia saw
regularly were devoted exclusively either to religion or to poultry, and
the world of politics was to her an unheeded unexplored region. Her
ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular
respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge
as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt's housekeeper had put at her
disposal.
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