Shovel only looked at him, but one eye can be so much more terrible than
two, that plop, plop, plop came the balloon softly down the steps of the
throne and at the foot shrank pitifully, as if with Ameliar's knife in
it.

"It's only a kid arter all!" screamed Shovel, furiously. Disappointment
gave him eloquence, and Tommy cowered under his sneers, not
understanding them, but they seemed to amount to this, that in
having a baby he had disgraced the house.

"But I think," he said, with diffidence, "I think I were once one."

Then all Shovel could say was that he had better keep it dark on that
stair.

Tommy squeezed his fist into one eye, and the tears came out at the
other. A good-natured impulse was about to make Shovel say that though
kids are undoubtedly humiliations, mothers and boys get used to them in
time, and go on as brazenly as before, but it was checked by Tommy's
unfortunate question, "Shovel, when will it come?"

Shovel, speaking from local experience, replied truthfully that they
usually came very soon after the doctor, and at times before him.

"It ain't come before him," Tommy said, confidently.

"How do yer know?"

"'Cos it weren't there at dinner-time, and I been here since
dinner-time."