Five blocks out of my way from school her father's store was, but four times I walked past that store window the day after the first time I saw her, and more than four times many a day later—to see her again. It was three months before I got courage to go nearer to her. And then it had to be a night with snow on the ground and sleigh-bells to the horses, and in the faces of men and women a kinder look and in the heart of a boy maybe a higher hope than ordinary.
Christmas eve it was and the store all decorated—candy canes, big and little, hanging among the bright things in the window. There were other people before me, but she nodded and smiled by way of letting me know that she saw I was waiting. She nodded in the same smiling way to a poor child and a rich man of the neighborhood.
"How much for a cane?" I asked when it came my turn, and I that nervous I exploded it from me.
"Canes?" She turned to the window. They were all prices, but I didn't hear what she said. I was listening to her voice and trembling as I listened.
There was a great big brute of a cane, tied with blue ribbons and hanging from a gas fixture. "How much for that one?" I asked.
"That?" She had violet eyes. She opened them wide at me. "That is two dollars."
"Let me have it," I said.
Her thin red lips opened up and the little teeth inside them shined out at me. "But you don't want to be buying that," she said; "we keep that more for show than to sell."
To this day a thing can come to my mind and be as if it happened before my eyes. "She thinks I'm one who can't afford to spend two dollars for that cane, and she's going to stop me," I says to myself. "She thinks I am a foolish kind who would ruin himself to make a show." If there had been less truth in what she thought, maybe I would have been less upset. "I'll take it," I said. "I want it for a Christmas tree for my little nephew."
There was no nephew, little or big, and no Christmas tree, and that two dollars was every cent I had to spend for Christmas. But her eyes were still wide upon me, and I paid and walked out with the cane—without once turning at the door or peeking through the window in passing, for fear she would be looking after me, and I wouldn't have her think that a two-dollar candy cane wasn't what I could buy every day of my life if it pleased me.