"It's funny," Mary said, "that you should tell me that--now. I haven't told you what's in my letter." "What was?" asked Jenny. Mary told her. "They want I should have the little boy," she ended it. "Oh...." Jenny said. "Mary! How wonderful for you! Why, it's almost next as wonderful as mine!" Mary hesitated for a breath. But she was profoundly stirred by what Jenny had told her--the first time, so far as she could recall, that news like this had ever come to her directly, as a secret and a marvel. News of the village births usually came in gossip, in commiseration, in suspicion. Falling as did this confidence in a time when she was re-living her old hope, when Adam's boy stood outside her threshold, the moment quite suddenly put on its real significance. "We can plan together," Jenny was saying. "Ain't it wonderful?" "Ain't it?" Mary said then, simply, and kissed Jenny, when Jenny came and kissed her. Then Jenny went away. Mary went on to the barn, and opened the door, and listened. She had brought no lantern, but the soft stillness within needed no vigilance. The hay smell from the loft and the mangers, the even breath of the cows, the quiet safety of the place, met her. She was wondering at herself, but she was struggling not at all. It was as if concerning the little boy, something had decided for her, in a soft, fierce rush of feeling not her own. She had committed herself to Jenny almost without will. But Mary felt no exultation, and the weight within her did not lift. "I really couldn't do anything else but take him, I s'pose," she thought. "I wonder what'll come on me next?" All the while, she was conscious of the raw smell of the clover in the hay of the mangers, as if something of Summer were there in the cold. VI Mary Chavah sent her letter of blunt directions concerning her sister's headstone and the few belongings which her sister had wished her to have. The last lines of the letter were about the boy. "Send the little one along. I am not the one, but I don't know what else to tell you to do with him. Let me know when to expect him, and put his name in with his things--I can't remember his right name." When the answer came from John Blood, a fortnight later, it said that a young fellow of those parts was starting back home shortly to spend Christmas, and would take charge of the child as far as the City, and there put him on his train for Old Trail Town. She would be notified just what day to expect him, and John knew how glad his mother would have been and his father too, and he was her grateful Nephew. P. S. He would send some money every month "toward him." The night after she received this letter, Mary lay long awake, facing what it was going to mean to have him there: to have a child there. She recalled what she had heard other women say about it,--stray utterances, made with the burdened look that hid a secret complacency, a kind of pleased freemasonry in a universal lot.