She looked at Jenny's Christmas things—a ribbon rattle, a crocheted cap, a first picture book, a cascade of colored rings—and then in grim humour at Jenny.
"It'll never miss its Christmas," she said dryly.
"Don't you think so?" said Jenny, soberly. "I donno. It seems as if it'd be kind o' lonesome to get born around Christmas and not find any going on."
She put the things away, and closed the drawer. For no appreciable reason, she kept it locked, and the key under the bureau cover.
"Do you know yet when yours is coming?" Jenny asked, as she rose.
"Week after next," Mary repeated,—"two weeks from last night," she confessed, "if he comes straight through."
"I think," said Jenny, "I think mine will be here—before then."
When they reached the foot of the stair, Mary unexpectedly refused to go in the sitting room.
"No," she said, "I must be getting home. I just come out for a minute, anyway. I'm—I'm much obliged for what you showed me," she added, and hesitated. "I've got his room fixed up real nice. There's owls on the wall paper and puppies on the washbasin," she said. "Come in when you can and see it."
It was almost dusk when Mary reached home. While she was passing the billboard at the corner—a flare of yellow letters, as if Colour and the Alphabet had united to breed a monster—she heard children shouting. A block away, and across the street, coming home from Rolleston's hill where they had been coasting, were Bennet and Gussie Bates, little Emily, Tab Winslow, and Pep. Nearly every day of snow they passed her house. She always heard them talking, and usually she heard, across at the corner, the click of the penny-in-the-slot machine, which no child seemed able to pass without pulling. To-night, as she heard them coming, Mary fumbled in her purse. Three, four, five pennies she found and ran across the street and dropped them in the slot machine, and gained her own door before the children came. She stood at her dark threshold, and listened. She had not reckoned in vain. One of the children pushed down on the rod, in the child's eternal hope of magic, and when magic came and three, four, five chocolates dropped obediently in their hands, Mary listened to what they said. It was not much, and it was not very coherent, but it was wholly intelligible.