“Still, if Bab’s hit a new trail of interest, it will make her think she’s really working. Things have come to her so easily, she doesn’t appreciate them. Perhaps she can express herself now.” “Express herself? For pity’s sake, Jeanie. Tell her to come up here, and we’ll let her express herself all over the place. Oh! Just smell my mince pies this minute. Isn’t cooking an expression of individual art too?” said Kit teasingly as she made a bee line for the oven in time to rescue four mince pies. “Who’s going to drive down after the Christmas box?” Mrs. Robbins glanced in at the group in the sunlight. “I wish to send an order for groceries too and you’ll want to be back before dark.” “I’m terribly sorry, Mother dear,” called Kit from the kitchen, “but Sally and some of the girls are coming over and I promised them I’d go after evergreen and Princess pine. We’re gathering it for wreaths and stars to decorate the church.” “And I promised Father if his magazines came, I’d read to him,” Helen added. “And here they are, so I can’t go.” “Dorrie and I’ll go. I love the drive.” Jean handed Bab’s letter over to Kit to read, and gave just a bit of a sigh. Not a real one, only a bit of a one. Nobody could possibly have sustained any inward melancholy at Greenacres. There was too much to be done every minute of the day. Kit often said she felt exactly like “Twinkles,” Billie’s gray squirrel, whirling around in its cage. Still, Bab’s letter did bring back strongly the dear old times last winter at the Art Academy. Perhaps the girl students did take themselves and their aims too seriously, and had been like that prince in Tennyson’s “Princess,” who mistook the shadow for the substance. Yet it had all been wonderfully happy and interesting. Even in the hills of rest, she missed the companionship of girls her own age with the same tastes and interests as herself. Shad harnessed up Princess and drove around to the side porch steps. It seemed as if he grew taller all the time. When the minister from the little white church had come to call, he had found Shad wrapping up the rose bushes in their winter coats of sacking. Shad stood up, six feet of lanky, overgrown, shy Yankee boy, and shook hands. “Well, well, Shadrach, son, you’re getting nearer heaven sooner than most of us, aren’t you?” laughed Mr. Peck. And he was. Grew like a weed, Shad himself said, but Doris told him pines grew fast too, and she thought that some day he’d be a Norway spruce which is used for ship-masts. Mrs. Robbins came out carrying her own warm fur cloak to wrap Doris in, and an extra lap robe. “Better take the lantern along,” advised Shad, in his slow drawling way. “Looks like snow and it’ll fall dark kind of early.” He went back to the barn and brought a lantern to tuck in under the seat. Princess, dancing and side stepping in her anxiety to be off, took the road with almost a scamper. Her winter coat was fairly long now, and Doris said she looked like a Shetland pony.