hey reached the foot of the stair, Mary unexpectedly refused to go
in the sitting room.

"No," she said, "I must be getting home. I just come out for a minute,
anyway. I'm--I'm much obliged for what you showed me," she added, and
hesitated. "I've got his room fixed up real nice. There's owls on the
wall paper and puppies on the washbasin," she said. "Come in when you
can and see it."

It was almost dusk when Mary reached home. While she was passing the
billboard at the corner--a flare of yellow letters, as if Colour and the
Alphabet had united to breed a monster--she heard children shouting. A
block away, and across the street, coming home from Rolleston's hill
where they had been coasting, were Bennet and Gussie Bates, little
Emily, Tab Winslow, and Pep. Nearly every day of snow they passed her
house. She always heard them talking, and usually she heard, across at
the corner, the click of the penny-in-the-slot machine, which no child
seemed able to pass without pulling. To-night, as she heard them coming,
Mary fumbled in her purse. Three, four, five pennies she found and ran
across the street and dropped them in the slot machine, and gained her
own door before the children came. She stood at her dark threshold, and
listened. She had not reckoned in vain. One of the children pushed down
on the rod, in the child's eternal hope of magic, and when magic came
and three, four, five chocolates dropped obediently in their hands, Mary
listened to what they said. It was not much, and it was not very
coherent, but it was wholly intelligible.

"Look at!" shrieked Bennet, who had made the magic.

"_Did_ it?" cried Gussie, and repeated the operation.

"It--it--it never!" said Tab Winslow, at the third.

"Make it again--make it again!" cried little Emily, and they did.

"Gorry," observed Pep, in ecstasy.

When it would give no more, they divided with the other children and ran
on, their red mittens and mufflers flaming in the snow. Mary stood
staring after them for a moment, then she closed her door.

"I wonder what made me do that," she thought.

In her dining room she mended the fire without taking off her hat. It
was curious, she reflected; here was this room looking the way it
looked, and away off there was the little fellow who had never seen the
room; and in a little while he would be calling this room home, and
looking for his books and his mittens, and knowing it better than any
other place in the world. And there