of
hospitality to the little stranger with a tag on. And it was the glory
of the little town being a little town that they somehow let it be known
that every one was expected to look in at Mary's that night. No one was
uninvited. And this was like a part of the midwinter mystery expressing
itself unbidden.

Mary alone was not told. She had consistently objected to the Christmas
observances for so long that they feared the tyranny of her custom. "She
might not let us do it," they said, "but if we all get there, she can't
help liking it. She would on any other day...."

... So she alone in Old Trail Town woke that morning before Christmas
with no knowledge of this that was afoot. And yet the day was not like
any other day, because she lay there dreading it more.

She had cleared out her little sleeping room, as she had cleared the
lower floor. The chamber, with its white-plastered walls, and boards
nearly bare, and narrow white bed, had the look of a cell, in the first
light struggling through the single snow-framed window. Here, since her
childhood she had lain nightly; here she had brought her thought of Adam
Blood, and had seen the thought die and had watched with it; here she
had lain on the nights after her parents had died; here she had rested,
body-sick with fatigue, in the years that she had toiled to keep her
home. In all that time there had gone on within her many kinds of death.
She had arrived somehow at a dumb feeling that these dyings were
gradually uncovering her self from somewhere within; rather, uncovering
some self whose existence she only dimly guessed. "They's two of me,"
she had thought more often of late "and we don't meet--we don't meet."
She lived among her neighbors without hate, without malice; for years
she had "meant nothing but love"--and this not negatively. The rebellion
against Christmas was against only the falsity of its meaningless
observance. The rebellion against taking the child, though somewhat
grounded in her distrust of her own fitness, was really the last vestige
of a self that had clung to her, in bitterness not toward Adam, but
toward Lily. Ever since she had known that the child was coming she had
felt a kind of spiritual exhaustion, sharpened by the strange sense of
oppression that hung upon her like an illness.

"I feel as if something was going to happen," she kept saying.

In a little while she leaned toward the window at her bed's head, and
looked down the hill towar