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"I donno but I might as well walk around by Mary Chavah's house," he thought. "I needn't stay long...." At Mary Chavah's house the two big parlours, the hall, the stairs, the dining room, even the tiny bedroom with the owl wall paper, were filled with folk come to welcome the little boy.
While he went within doors he had left the hobbyhorse in the snow, close to the wall; and he came back there to wait. The street had emptied. By now every one had gone to Mary Chavah's. Once he caught the gleam of lanterns down the road and heard children's voices singing. For some time he heard the singing, and after it had stopped he fancied that he heard it.
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?
"Ladies," said Mis' Winslow, with no other preface, "what do you think? Mary Chavah's little boy is coming from Idaho with a tag on, and when do you s'pose he's going to get here? Christmas Eve." "Christmas Eve," repeated Mis' Bates, whose mind never lightly forsook old ways or embraced a contretemps; "what a funny time to travel."
Her mother had written to her of the town's talk, but the placard made it seem worse. "I'll go in on the way home and see what Mary says," she thought, and asked for the letter that lay in Mary Chavah's box, next her own. They gave her the letter without question.
I guess we can go ahead just like it was a plain day o' the week, can't we?" "Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?"
"I voted against it that night at the town meeting, but I guess nobody heard me." "Well," said Simeon, "and so here you've got a Christmas of your own going forward, neat as a kitten's foot " "Ain't you coming over to Mary Chavah's?" Abel broke in with a kind of gentleness. "All of you?" Ellen smote her hands together. "I meant to go over later," she said, "and take " She paused.
"If the little kid that come in the store last Christmas Eve tries to come in again to-night," he said, "he won't find it all pitch dark, anyway. I'd like to know who he was...." Near the corner that turned down to the Rule Factory, they saw Ebenezer Rule coming toward them on the Old Trail Road. They called to him. "Hello, Ebenezer," said Abel, "ain't you coming in to Mary Chavah's to-night?"
At the end of the street he could see them crossing under the light, on their way to Mary Chavah's. Abel and Simeon might stop for him ... but how could he go there, among the folk whom he had virtually denied their Christmas? What would they have to say to him? Yet what they should say would, after all, matter nothing to him ... and perhaps he would hear them say something about Bruce and Jenny.
If he went to Jenny's, if he signified so that he wished not to be cut off from her and Bruce and the baby, if he asked Bruce to come back to the business, these meant a lifetime of modification to the boy's ideals for that business, and modification to the lives of the "hands" back there in Mary Chavah's house and to something else.... "What else?" he asked himself.
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