aste a lot of time
pottering over him."

It was so that she spent the weeks until the letter came telling her
what day the child would start. On the afternoon of the day the letter
came, she went down town to the Amos Ames Emporium to buy a washbasin
and pitcher for the room she meant the little boy to have. She stood
looking at a basin with a row of brown dogs around the rim, when over
her shoulder Mis' Abby Winslow spoke.

"You ain't buying a Christmas present for anybody, are you?" she asked
warningly.

Mary started guiltily and denied it.

"Well, what in time do you want with dogs on the basin?" Mis' Winslow
demanded.

Almost against her own wish, Mary told her. Mis' Winslow was one of
those whose faces are invariable forerunners of the sort of thing they
are going to say. With eyebrows, eyes, forehead, head, and voice she
took the news.

"He is! Forever and ever more. When's he going to get here?"

"Week after next," Mary said listlessly. "It's an awful responsibility,
ain't it--taking a child so?"

Mis' Winslow's face abruptly rejected its own anxious lines and let the
eyes speak for it.

"I always think children is like air," she said; "you never realize how
hard they're pressing down on you--but you do know you can't live
without them."

Mary looked at her, her own face not lighting.

"I'd rather go along like I am," she said; "I'm used to myself the way I
am."

"Mary Chavah!" said Mis' Winslow, sharply, "a vegetable sprouts. Can't
you? Is these stocking caps made so's they won't ravel?" she inquired
capably of Abel Ames. "These are real good value, Mary," she added
kindly. "Better su'prise the little thing with one of these. A red one."

Mary counted over her money, and bought the red stocking cap and the
basin with the puppies. Then she went into the street. The sense of
oppression, of striving, that had seldom left her since that night in
the stable, made the day a thing to be borne, to be breasted. The air
was thick with snow, and in the whiteness the dreary familiarity of the
drug store, the meat market, the post office, the Simeon Buck Dry Goods
Exchange, smote her with a passion to escape from them all, to breed new
familiars, to get free of the thing that she had said she would do.

"And I could," she thought; "I could telegraph to John not to send him.
But Jenny--she can't. I don't see how she stands it...."

The thought may have been why, instead of going home, she went to see
Jenn