CHAPTER XVI.
DOWN AT ALLINGTON.
It was Christmas-time down at Allington, and at three o'clock on Christmas Eve, just as the darkness of the early winter evening was coming on, Lily Dale and Grace Crawley were seated together, one above the other, on the steps leading up to the pulpit in Allington Church.

They had been working all day at the decorations of the church, and they were now looking round them at the result of their handiwork.

To an eye unused to the gloom the place would have been nearly dark; but they could see every corner turned by the ivy sprigs, and every line on which the holly-leaves were shining.
And the greeneries of the winter had not been stuck up in the old-fashioned, idle way, a bough just fastened up here and a twig inserted there; but everything had been done with some meaning, with some thought towards the original architecture of the building.

The Gothic lines had been followed, and all the lower arches which it had been possible to reach with an ordinary ladder had been turned as truly with the laurel cuttings as they had been turned originally with the stone.
"I wouldn't tie another twig," said the elder girl, "for all the Christmas pudding that was ever boiled." "It's lucky then that there isn't another twig to tie." "I don't know about that.

I see a score of places where the work has been scamped.