"There's only the one," Helders repeated. "The others is little bits of babies, or else spoke for like ours--long ago. It seems they do that way. But I want you should do something: I want you and Matthew should take this one. Mother and I--are older ... we ain't set store so much...." Ellen shook her head, and made him know, with what words she could find, that it could not be so. Then she knelt and touched at the coat of the child, a small frightened thing, with cap too large for him and one mitten lost. But he looked up brightly, and his eyes stayed on the Christmas tree. Ellen said little things to him, and went to take down for him some trifle from the tree. "I'm just as much obliged," she said quietly to Helders. "I never thought of there not being enough. We'll wait." Helders was fumbling for something. "Here's your candles, I thought you might want them for somethin' else," he said, and turned to Matthew: "And here's your quarter. I didn't get the toy you mentioned. I thought you wouldn't want it, without the little kid." Matthew looked swiftly at Ellen. He had not told her that he had sent by Helders for a toy. And at that Ellen crossed abruptly to her husband, and she was standing there as they let Helders out, with the little boy. Ellen's father pounded his knee. "But how long'll we have to wait? How long'll we have to wait?" he demanded shrilly. "King and country, why didn't somebody ask him that?" Matthew tore open the door. "Helders!" he shouted, "how long did they say we'd have to wait?" "Mebbe only a week or two--mebbe longer," Helders' voice came out of the dark. "They couldn't tell me." Ellen's mother stood fastening up a fallen tinsel walnut. "Let's us leave the tree right where it is," she said. "Even with it here, we won't have enough Christmas to hurt anything." XI On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early, while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation. "It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people are not yet born." "Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of woman. "You," they had answered. On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of cloud, globed and shining, like the world. "You," they had kept on saying. The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness. "I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.