"But was not Christ always born?" he persisted.
"Yes, yes," she replied. "But I cannot talk to you now. Be quiet a little while. I have something to do," and so saying, she drew to her side a basket of old letters.
The children remained silent, or made little signs to one another as they watched the fire. Meanwhile the mother considered the papers, now with a gleam of anger in her eyes, as she read, and now with a momentary blur of tear-dimmed vision. Most of the letters she threw at once on the fire. They writhed a moment like living creatures, and of a sudden blazed out as if tormented into sudden confession of the passions of years gone by; then they fell away to black unmemoried things, curling crumpled in the heat.
The children saw them burn with simple interest in each new conflagration. Something in the mother's ways quieted them, and they became intuitively conscious of sadness in the hour and the task. At last the boy grew uneasy at the long repose of tongue.
"O Alice! see the red sparks going about," he said, looking at the wandering points of light in the blackening scrolls of shrivelled paper.
"Nurse says those are people going to church," said his sister, authoritatively.
Her mother looked up, smiling. "Ah, that is what they used to tell me when I was little."
"They're fire-flies," said the boy, "like in a vewy dark night." Now and then his r's troubled him a little, and conscious of his difficulty, he spoke at times with oddly serious deliberation.
"You really must be quiet," said the mother. "Now, do keep still, or you will have to go to bed," and so saying she turned anew to the basket.