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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
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