But the Shadow Man stubbornly persisted.
"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll go back now and kiss her thumbs, if you'll kiss her eyes when you go in; as—er—a favor. 'Stoop over the little sleeper,' you know, and 'press your mother's lips to the closed blue orbs.'" He seemed to be quoting something.
"But I haven't any mother's lips," sighed Miss Theodosia, "only the kind for thumbs—just thumbs. I'm sorry," she added humbly. Curiously she experienced no surprise at this intimate turn of a conversation with a Shadow Man at midnight.
"That's all right—that's all right," the Shadow Man assured her. "Only thought I'd feel a little better to prove it was done that way. Hadn't any business mixing up with women's lips and kiddies' orbs, anyway! Serves me right." And now it was his turn to be humble. "Good night," and he was gone.
It was into a tiny bedroom off the kitchen, where a needle of light from a turned-down lamp barely pricked the darkness, that Miss Theodosia found her way. She had a dim picture of littering little clothes about the room and on the flat pillows of the bed the round, flushed face of Evangeline. In a clothes basket beside the bed she dimly saw a little mound that might be Elly Precious—it was Elly Precious! The little mound stirred with a curious, nestling sound, and instantly Stefana stirred also and crooned. Even in her sleep she was the little Mother. Miss Theodosia felt her own throat tighten and fill.
Stefana still clasped the bundle of apron in her arms, and Miss Theodosia did not dare try to take it away from her. She merely arranged it a little more comfortably and smoothed Stefana out. Queer!—as if at some other time, in some passed-by existence, she had smoothed out a child. She seemed to know how. Suddenly she stooped and kissed, not Stefana's thumbs but her eyes.
"The starch!" murmured Stefana as Miss Theodosia turned away. "Some'dy get it!" The deep sleep had broken a little, and through the break trickled a thread of Stefana's troubles. Then, again, silence and peace. No sound from bed or clothes basket on the floor.
Outside, in the faint starlight, Miss Theodosia drew a long breath. She softly laughed. Curious how much like a sob a little laugh can be! Oh, starlit night of adventuring! What next? Miss Theodosia's mantle of gentle melancholy slid from her shoulders; she no longer felt apprehensions of growing old. Continually she saw Evangeline's rosy face on that flat pillow, and the little mound of Elly Precious. She remembered how tiny the house had looked from the inside, and how many little littering clothes she had seen. The appealing quality of empty little clothes! In Miss Theodosia's inside room of her soul, something stirred behind the locked door.
The irons had cooled too much, and the fire was low. Miss Theodosia went to work again. As she worked, she talked to herself sociably.
"Adventures thicken! Stars, and angels in caps, and children that walk in their little sleeps! And little heaps in clothes baskets, that are babies! And—Theodosia Baxter—a Man! Out of a clear, inky sky! Why weren't you scared? How do you know—you never even saw his face—maybe he was a thief, and a marauder, and a thug!"