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A white arch divided the two chambers, like a benign brow whose face had long been dimmed away. It was all exquisitely clean and icy cold. A little snow drifted in through the muslin curtains. The breath of the two women showed. "What on earth you done that for?" Jenny demanded. Mary Chavah stood in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face not veiling its pure austerity.
"Step right in this way," said Mary; "this door's unfastened." "Forevermore!" Jenny said, "Mary Chavah! What you got your house all open for? You ain't moving?" A gust of wind took Mary's answer. She tossed the rug across the icy railing of the porch and beckoned Jenny into the house, and into the parlour. And when she had greeted Jenny after the months of her absence:
Yet, besides Mary Chavah and Ebenezer Rule, probably the only person in the town whose satisfaction in the project could be counted on to be unfeigned was little Tab Winslow.
On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence. But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry window at the sparrows on the bird box. "It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to her, so."
At the meeting there was almost nobody who, in the course of the evening, did not make or reply to some form of observation on one theme. It was: "Well, I wish Mary Chavah'd been to the meeting. She'd have enjoyed herself." Or, "Well, won't Mary Chavah be glad of this plan they've got? She's wanted it a good while." Or, "We all seem to have come to Mary Chavah's way of thinking, don't we?
"A week from Tuesday," she repeated. "A week from Tuesday!" she exclaimed. "Why, Mary Chavah. That's Christmas Eve." It was some matter of recipes that was absorbing Mis' Bates and Mis' Moran when Mis' Winslow breathlessly returned to them. They were deep in tradition, and in method, its buttonhole relation.
Later in the day, happening in at Mis' Mortimer Bates's, Mis' Winslow found Mis' Moran there before her, and asked what they had heard "about Mary Chavah." Something in that word "about" pricks curiosity its sharpest. "Have you heard about Mary Chavah?" "It's too bad about Mary Chavah." "Isn't it queer about Mary Chavah?" each of these is like setting flame to an edge of tissue.
But in that hour which seemed pure essence, with no attenuating sound or touch, he kept on up the hill toward Jenny's house. Mary Chavah left ajar the door from the child's room to the room where, in the dark, the tree stood. He had wanted the door to be ajar "so the things I think about can go back and forth," he had explained.
All the while, she was conscious of the raw smell of the clover in the hay of the mangers, as if something of Summer were there in the cold. Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy. "Send the little one along.
Mary Chavah stood silent, and as the train drew away held out her hand, still in silence, for the boy to take. As the noise of the train lessened, he looked up. "Are you her?" he asked soberly. "Yes," she cried joyously, "I'm her!" Their way led east between high banks of snow.
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