"Quick, shut the door, or all the snow will come in."
They cowered into a corner behind the hearth; the woman walked up and down, carrying a child in her arms that coughed and choked and gasped for air. In the only bed lay a feverish girl, emaciated, with unkempt hair and large restless eyes. Sorrow sat on the edge of the couch and held her hand; the girl talked incessantly, softly and quickly—
"You see it is Christmas, once that was so beautiful, when things still went well with us. Then we always had a tree and apples and gingerbread, and I had a doll that had clothes like a princess. I liked sewing them for my dolly; I don't like it now for other people."
She smiled.
"What a pity you can't see the little dress I made for this evening, white and red, with cords and pink bows."
Then the crack of the door opened and Envy pushed himself in softly, invisibly. It grew markedly colder in the room. The mother's face became gloomy, the feverish girl more restless.
"Oh," she cried, impatiently, "always sewing, always sewing. Why do the others, who were poor, drive about in fine carriages, and wear soft clothes and laugh so merrily! If they are wicked, well, then it must be nice to be wicked. What does my labor bring me?—hunger and pain!"
The mother did not hear her daughter's rapid words, for the child in her arms was wrestling with death. Outside the wind howled. The two other children had fallen asleep in their corner, hungry and exhausted, and in their dreams Envy had no more power over them, and they only saw the beautiful Christmas tree shimmering. It was a long night in which the lamp of life flickered up and down in that little house, and a young soul fought at the hand of Sorrow the fight for life and death.
Towards morning the wrestling of both was ended. The child lay dead in its mother's lap, the young girl slumbered restlessly. The storm was over. The glittering snow lay piled up high, looking blue in the shadows of the houses, and softly tinted with red where the rising sun met it. Then the bells began to peal for merry Christmas. That woke the two children, who stared aghast at the little corpse. The young girl raised herself, and saw that her mother wept, but from her eyes there came no tears—she envied the dead child its rest.