"You can decide that yourself, practically. Perhaps a month. Depends upon your arrangement of your route. I say, that's fine!" He rose, slapping his hands against his pockets. "You'll think it out! It's by far the best way to convince Waterbury you are serious, and worth a real salary." Think it out! Catherine let the idea play with her. Trains, new cities, new people, herself as dignified representative of the Bureau. But the children! She couldn't leave them--and Charles. Her clothes weren't up to such a position. She could buy more! Her salary would grow to cover--anything! * * * * * When she went home in the cold winter twilight, she had coiled the project into a tight spring, held firmly down below thought. She couldn't go. How could she? But she had a week before she must reject it openly. The pressure of that coiled spring was terrific. At any instant it might tear up through thought and feeling. Mrs. O'Lay had been persuaded to divide her day so that she spent part of the afternoon in her own basement, and then stayed to serve dinner and clear up the kitchen for Catherine. Charles said he felt as if an Irish hippopotamus hovered at his elbow at the table, but Catherine stretched luxuriously into freedom from dinner responsibility. If Mrs. O'Lay had a sketchy art as a cook, Catherine found dinner more palatable than when she had flown into domestic harness at the end of the day. The children were full of whispering excitement; the house was made up of restricted zones. Marian wasn't to put her head inside Spencer's door, and mother shouldn't look into his closet. Charles had brought home a tree as tall as Spencer, which spread its branches drooping and green in front of the living room windows. Miss Kelly, calmly methodical as ever, helped the children string cranberries and popcorn to wind through the needles. "Saturday we will trim it," Catherine promised them, "and Saturday night you can each wrap your presents in red paper and label them." "Then you'll see them when we are in bed," protested Marian. "I won't take a single peek!" Saturday afternoon Catherine stood on a chair, hunting on the top shelf of the hall closet for the box of tinsel and small tree lights. Surely she had left it there on that shelf. She smiled a little, at her own warm content. The shimmering joy of the children had thrown its glow over her, too, and the sardonic Christmas of the streets seemed remote, unreal. "Hurry up, Muvver dear!" called Marian. "Isn't it there?" Catherine felt the corner of a pasteboard box, tugged at it, caught it as it slipped over the edge of the shelf, the cover whirling past her hand.