"I'll let him enjoy the Christmas Tree before saying anything about it."
The policeman answered, regretfully: "Do you think you must?"
"I know I must. He ought to be told. He has a right to know. He might resent it later if we didn't tell him now."
The door having closed on this friend, Tom Whitelaw, so to call him henceforth, made his way into the room where the Christmas Tree was presently to be lighted up. But he had no heart for the spectacle. There was something new. In the grip of the forces which controlled his life he felt helpless, small. Even his companions in misfortune, as all these children were, could be relatively light-hearted. They could clap their hands when the Tree began to burn with magic fires, and take pleasure in the presents handed out to them. He could not. He was waiting for something to be told to him--something he had a right to know.
One by one, the presents were cut from the Tree; one by one the children went up to receive this addition to what Santa Claus had brought them in the morning. His own name was among the last. When it was called he went forward perfunctorily at first, and then with a sudden inspiration.
His package was handed him, not by one of the matrons but by a beaming young lady from outside. As she bent to deliver it he had his question ready.
"Please, miss, what's cyanide of potassium?"
He had repeated the words to himself so often during the half hour since first hearing them that he pronounced them distinctly. The young lady laughed.
"Why, I think it's a deadly poison." She turned to the matron nearest her. "What is cyanide of potassium? This dear little boy wants to know."
But the dear little boy had already walked soberly back to his seat. While the other children made merry with their presents he sat with his on his lap, and reflected. Poison was something that killed people. He knew that. In one of the houses where they had lived a woman had taken poison, and two days later he had seen her carried out in a long black box. The impression had remained with him poignantly.
He had no inclination to cry. Tears could bring little relief in this kind of cosmic catastrophe. If his mother had taken poison and was to be carried out in a long black box, everything that had made up his world would have collapsed. He could only wait submissively till the thing he ought to know was told to him.