VIII
"If we took the day before Christmas an' had it for Christmas," observed Tab Winslow, "would that hurt?"
"Eat your oatmeal," said Mis' Winslow, in the immemorial manner of adults.
"Would it, would it, would it?" persisted Tab, in the immemorial manner of youth.
"And have Theophilus Thistledown for dinner that day instead?" Mis' Winslow suggested with diplomacy.
On which Tab ate his oatmeal in silence.
But, like adults immemorially, Mis' Winslow bore far more the adult manner than its heart. After breakfast she stood staring out the pantry window at the sparrows on the bird box.
"It looks like Mary Chavah was going to be the only one in Trail Town to have any Christmas after all," she thought, "that little boy coming to her, so."
He was coming week after next, Mary had said, and Mis' Winslow had heard no word about it from anybody else. When "the biggest of the work" of the forenoon was finished, Mis' Winslow ran down the road to Ellen Bourne's. In Old Trail Town they always speak of it as running down, or in, or over, in the morning, with an unconscious suiting of terms to informalities.