She was wholly ignorant that in that week just passed the word had been liberated and had run round Old Trail Town in the happiest open secrecy:-- "... coming way from Idaho, with a tag on, Christmas Eve. We thought if everybody could call that night--just run into Mary's, you know, like it was any other night, and take in a little something to eat--no presents, you know ... oh, of course, no presents! Just supper, in a basket. We'd all have to eat _some_-where. It won't be any Christmas celebration, of course--oh, no, not with the paper signed and all. But just for us to kind of meet and be there, when he gets off the train from Idaho." "Just ... like it was any other night." That was the part that abated suspicion. Indeed, that had been the very theory on which the nonobservance of Christmas had been based: the day was to be treated like any other day. And, obviously, on any other day such a simple plan as this for the welcoming of a little stranger from Idaho would have gone forward as a matter of course. Why deny him this, merely because the night of his arrival chanced to be Christmas Eve? When Christmas was to be treated _exactly_ as any other day? If, in the heart of Mis' Abby Winslow, where the plan had originated, it had originated side by side with the thought that the point of the plan was the incidence of Christmas Eve, she kept her belief secret. The open argument was unassailable, and she contented herself with that. Even Simeon Buck, confronted with it, was silent. "Goin' back on the paper, are you?" he had at first said, "and hev a celebration?" "Celebration of what?" Mis' Winslow demanded; "celebration of that little boy getting here all alone, 'way from Idaho. And we'd celebrate that any other night, wouldn't we? Of course we would. Our paper signing don't call for us to give everybody the cold shoulder as I know of, just because it's Christmas or Christmas Eve, either." "No," Simeon owned, "of course it don't. Of course it don't." As for Abel Ames, he accepted the proposal with an alacrity which he was put to it to conceal. "So do," he said heartily, "so do. I guess we can go ahead just like it was a plain day o' the week, can't we?" "Hetty," he said to his wife, whom that noon he went through the house to the kitchen expressly to tell, "can you bake up a basket of stuff to take over to Mary Chavah's next Tuesday night?" She looked up from the loaf she was cutting, the habitual wonder of her childish curved lashes accented by her sudden curving of eyebrows. "Next Tuesday?" she said, "Why, that's Christmas eve!" Abel explained, saying, "What of that?" and trying to speak indifferently but, in spite of himself, shining through. "Well, that's kind of nice to do, ain't it?" she answered. "My, yes," Abel said, emphatically, "It's a thing to do--that's the thing to do." It was Mis' Mortimer Bates, the nonconformist by nature, in whom doubts came nearest to expression.