ell me."

Ellen's mother stood fastening up a fallen tinsel walnut.

"Let's us leave the tree right where it is," she said. "Even with it
here, we won't have enough Christmas to hurt anything."

XI

On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early,
while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream
that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little
town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation.

"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people
are not yet born."

"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of
woman.

"You," they had answered.

On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of
cloud, globed and shining, like the world.

"You," they had kept on saying.

The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with
all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into
the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror
hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming
calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had
brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness.

"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.

She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been
liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open
secrecy:--

"... coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if
everybody could call that night--just run into Mary's, you know, like it
was any other night, and take in a little something to eat--no presents,
you know ... oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd
all have to eat _some_-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of
course--oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to
kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho."

"Just ... like it was any other night." That was the part that abated
suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the
nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated
like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan
as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have
gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because
the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas w