“If you believe, Lizzie, that I am going-” Lady Templar began.

“Cut line, Gertrude,” Lord Templar said.

Edwin smiled at his wife. “The lady of the house must be humored,” he said. “The center of the ceiling it will be, and now, before tea. We will need the ladder. Is it still in the dining room? Jonathan, would you fetch it, please? With Charles to help you?”

Five minutes later, he was perched in his shirtsleeves at the top of the high ladder beneath the coved ceiling, securing the gaily decorated kissing bough in its place while a chorus of conflicting advice came from below. Elizabeth stood at the foot of the ladder, her face upturned, Jeremy asleep openmouthed against her shoulder.

“Oh, that is perfect,” she said before he descended carefully.

“Now,” he remarked when he was safely down, “kissing boughs are not merely pretty decorations, you know. They have a practical function. And there is an obscure law, I believe, that the master of the house must be first to put it to use.”

Elizabeth turned that look of beauty on him. She also blushed and looked the nineteen-year-old she was, even though she was holding the baby. Her lips parted. She did not, as she had done in the woods during the morning, turn abruptly away or try to avoid what was coming.

She closed her eyes just before his lips touched hers. Her lips were trembling. They were also soft and still slightly parted, warm and moist. It was strange that after his wedding to an aristocratic iceberg he had performed his duty in the marriage bed but had never found the courage to kiss her. He had wanted to quite desperately.

But she was not an iceberg after all, he realized-perhaps he had been realizing it all day. Perhaps she did not like him, perhaps she resented his coming here with such little notice, but she was not frigid.

The kiss, very public and therefore very chaste, lasted for perhaps ten seconds.

Then it was over.

Their first kiss.

He slid one arm about Elizabeth’s waist, the baby nestled between them, and smiled into her eyes while several members of her family laughed or whistled or clapped their hands. Was it just Christmas that was putting this flush in her cheeks, this glow in her eyes, this warmth in his heart? he wondered.

But this was not the time to muse on the answer.

“I would have to say,” he said, looking about him and grinning, “that the kissing bough works very well indeed. I invite any skeptics to try it for themselves.”

Bertie drew a laughing Annabelle beneath the bough, and Lady Templar haughtily demanded her husband’s arm to lead her to a chair by the fire.

Edwin organized the removal of the ladder and other clearing-up tasks, and the tea trays were carried in while cousins and fiancés and a few older spouses merrily jostled for position beneath the kissing bough.

Elizabeth disappeared upstairs, the baby having woken up at the increased noise to the discovery that he was very hungry indeed.

This family, Edwin thought, was really not very unlike any other of his acquaintances once the repressive influence of Lady Templar was challenged and busy activities were offered. There was beginning to be both the look and the feel of Christmas about Wyldwood.

By dinnertime, Elizabeth was feeling quite weary from the unaccustomed activity and excitement, but she also knew that she did not want this day to come to an end. It was by far the happiest of her life. It was also the day during which she had really fallen in love with her husband. Oh, it was true that she had been dazzled by him the first time she saw him, only to be disappointed and disillusioned soon after. But she had been wrong about him for a whole year. He was not humorless or without character or personality. Quite the contrary. He was far more like his father than she had realized.

She wondered if he understood just how totally he had transformed their usual Christmas.

She wondered if he realized how very affected she had been by her first kiss, public and brief as it had been. She had relived it over and over again while feeding Jeremy afterward, her cheeks hot with pleasure. But it was not only the kiss she had recalled, startlingly intimate and wonderful as it had been. She had also remembered his smile, warm, almost tender, and directed fully at her, while his arm had circled her waist and their child had been safely nestled between them.

It was the sort of memory on which she would feed during the lonely times ahead.

But the happy novelty of this Christmas was still not over, as she discovered after dinner, even before she rose to lead the ladies to the drawing room so that the gentlemen might be left to their port. Uncle Oswald cleared his throat and spoke up for everyone at the table to hear.

“The Nativity scene is completed,” he announced, “and will be set up in the drawing room after dinner with the help of the children. I have been up to the nursery to arrange it. They will all come down, with your permission, Lizzie.”

“Definitely not again today, Oswald,” Lady Templar said. “It is far too close to their bedtime. I daresay that even in the homes of the middle classes children are not allowed into the drawing room during the evening.”

But Elizabeth had spoken up at the same moment. “Oh, yes, certainly,” she said, clasping her hands to her bosom. “What a lovely surprise!”

“It is Christmas Eve,” Uncle Oswald continued, “and the story of the Nativity must be told. Edwin has agreed to do it.”

So Mr. Chambers had been a part of these secret plans too, had he? He smiled at Elizabeth along the length of the table, and she felt her heart turn over. Was it possible that he liked her a little better today than he had before? But he was speaking to her.

“For such an important family celebration,” he asked, “shall we have Jeremy brought down too, Elizabeth?”

“Yes,” she said quickly before her mother could finish drawing breath to answer for her. “Having our children about us must be a part of all future family gatherings at Wyldwood. Especially Christmas. Christmas is about children-about a child.”

“Oh, I do agree with you, Lizzie,” Annabelle said fervently. “Don’t you, Bertie?”

“You know I do, Bella,” he said, though he cast a swift, self-conscious glance at his mother as he spoke.

Half an hour later all the adults and children, except those involved in the unveiling of the Nativity scene, were seated expectantly in the drawing room, one large family group, sharing together the warm anticipation of the approaching holy day.

Finally the door opened and Mr. Chambers came inside. He stepped to one side and opened the great leather-bound Bible he carried, while a hush fell on the gathering.

“ ‘And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,’ ” he read in a rich, clear voice.

As he read Saint Luke’s account of the arrival of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, two of the children came through the door, one carrying a folded piece of sacking, which he proceeded to spread out on the floor beneath the center window, and the other a roughly carved manger filled with straw, which she set down on the sacking.

“ ‘And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manager; because there was no room for them in the inn.’ ”

Three more children entered, one carrying Joseph, another Mary, and the third the baby Jesus, wrapped tightly in a piece of white cloth. He was laid carefully on the straw, and his parents were set down on either side of the manger.

A group of shepherds, all carved together out of one piece of wood, came next.

“ ‘And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone ’round about them: and they were sore afraid.’ ”

Two children entered, bearing a paper angel and a paper star, which they pinned to the curtain above the stable.

“ ‘Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.’ ” Mr.

Chambers closed the book as Uncle Oswald stepped quietly into the room.

There was no applause. It was perhaps the best compliment to the skill of Uncle Oswald, whose figures were large and rudely carved and yet evocative of the ageless wonder of the Christmas story.

There was a moment of silence, during which Elizabeth, holding Jeremy, fought tears and failed to stop one from trickling down each cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. She swallowed and spoke more firmly. “Oh, thank you so very much, Uncle Oswald, children, and M… and Edwin. This is the crowning moment of a truly wonderful day.”

There was a chorus of voices then-the adults complimenting the performers and the carver, the children explaining loudly to anyone who would listen how they had been told to walk slowly and had almost forgotten but had remembered at the last moment and then could not remember whether Mary went at the right side of the manger or the left or whether the angel went above or below the star. Someone wanted to know why there were no Wise Men, and Uncle Oswald explained that they appeared only in Saint Matthew’s gospel, and he had had no time to carve them anyway.

Aunt Maria got to her feet and seated herself on the pianoforte bench.

She did not have to call for silence. Somehow it fell of its own accord as she played the opening bars of “Lully, Lulla, Thou Little Tiny Child.”

They all sang. And they all surely felt the wonder and warmth and healing power of love in the form of the baby, invisible inside his swaddling clothes, and of Christmas itself. Oh, surely they all felt it, Elizabeth thought. She could not be the only one.

She was aware as Aunt Maria proceeded to a second Christmas carol that Mr. Chambers was standing beside her chair. His hand came to rest on her shoulder as he sang with everyone else, and then, when Jeremy began to fuss, he leaned over her and picked up the baby, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Elizabeth swallowed against the lump in her throat. How would she ever be able to face her life when Christmas was over and everyone had left except her mother and father? But she would not think of that yet. Not tonight.

They sang for half an hour before the tea tray was brought in.

“There is a service in the village church at nine o’clock in the morning, I have been told,” Edwin said after the children had all been sent off to bed, yawning and protesting.

Everyone looked at him rather as if he had sprouted a second head. They were not much of a churchgoing family. But several people had an opinion.

“Much too early,” Michael said.

“The carriages could not be taken out in all this snow.”

“We could walk, silly. It is less than two miles.”

“Go to church? On Christmas Day?”

“Peregrine, you will not call your sister silly.”

“That is the whole point, my dear.”

“I’ll come,” Elizabeth said, smiling at Mr. Chambers, and remembering how unexpectedly pleasant it had been to speak his given name a few minutes ago.

The chorus of comments continued.

“It would be fitting, after all we have done today.”

“We could have another snowball fight on the way home.”

“The service could not come even close to being as affecting as this little ceremony here this evening, though, could it?”

“And build an appetite for the goose and the plum pudding.”

“Does the vicar give long sermons, Lizzie?”

“You never lack for appetite, exercise or no.”

“Oh, yes, let’s go to church,” Annabelle said. “Let’s walk there through the snow. Together, as a family. What a perfectly delightful Christmas this is turning out to be. The best ever. Thanks to Lizzie and Edwin, that is. You can invite us here every year, you two.”

There was a burst of hearty laughter and even a smattering of applause.

“Consider the invitation extended,” Mr. Chambers said with a twinkle in his eye. “And after we have feasted and stuffed ourselves tomorrow, we will go down to the lake and make a slide. Unfortunately we have no skates, though I promise there will be some next year. But a slide we will have-and a contest to see who can skid the farthest without coming to grief.”

They drank their tea and finally dispersed for the night with warm, cheerful good-nights. Mr. Chambers was talking with a group of uncles and aunts when Elizabeth slipped away to the nursery to give Jeremy his night feeding. Her mother caught up with her on the stairs.

“It is to be hoped, Lizzie,” she said, “that tomorrow you will exert more control over your own home than you did today. I cannot tell you how shocked I have been-and all this family has been-over the indiscretion of allowing the children out of the nursery to mingle with the adults when their nurses are being paid to keep them under control in the nursery. And the vulgarity of all those decorations, including the embarrassingly amateurish efforts of Oswald to produce a Nativity scene.And the kissing bough. I never thought to live to see such a day in any home occupied by the members of my own family. It comes, of course, of the unfortunate circumstance of your having to marry a cit.