"It's only a kid arter all!" screamed Shovel, furiously. Disappointment gave him eloquence, and Tommy cowered under his sneers, not understanding them, but they seemed to amount to this, that in having a baby he had disgraced the house.
"But I think," he said, with diffidence, "I think I were once one."
Then all Shovel could say was that he had better keep it dark on that stair.
Tommy squeezed his fist into one eye, and the tears came out at the other. A good-natured impulse was about to make Shovel say that though kids are undoubtedly humiliations, mothers and boys get used to them in time, and go on as brazenly as before, but it was checked by Tommy's unfortunate question, "Shovel, when will it come?"
Shovel, speaking from local experience, replied truthfully that they usually came very soon after the doctor, and at times before him.
"It ain't come before him," Tommy said, confidently.
"How do yer know?"
"'Cos it weren't there at dinner-time, and I been here since dinner-time."
The words meant that Tommy thought it could only enter by way of the stair, and Shovel quivered with delight. "H'st!" he cried, dramatically, and to his joy Tommy looked anxiously down the stair, instead of up it.
"Did you hear it?" Tommy whispered.