At such times Rufus and Jenny would talk together before she gathered up the dishes. She allowed him a pipe, and when she attempted to rise and go to the kitchen he would say: "Take your 'nooning,' Miss Jenny, same as the rest of us. The minute you drop your housework you take out your needle." "I've had to be busy to keep from thinking, these last two years," she said, quietly arranging the knives and forks for clearing away. "Now I'm afraid of getting idle, for what with company at lunch, the sound of hammer or saw all day, and the smell of paint all night, it seems as if Boston couldn't be any gayer than my little house." Rufus liked to watch the dimple come and go in Jenny's cheek, a dimple that had enjoyed little use till lately; he also admired the whiteness of the neck that rose out of the blue gingham working dress, and the long eyelashes that too often lay on her cheek and hid her brown eyes. He often tried to say something that would bring a quick upward glance full of fun or understanding. As for his talk, no words can tell what it was to the girl who had spent hundreds of long, silent, lonely days, feeling her youth slipping by, a tragedy without a single witness. "Where were you last Christmas, Miss Jenny Wren?" Rufus asked between pipe-puffs, after lunching gloriously on shoulder-of-mutton stew. (He had always called her Miss Jenny Wren after the first week.) "Here, of course!" she said, smiling. "I was born here, lived here and probably shall die here. All the rooms but the kitchen had icicles hanging from the ceilings and window-frames. The parlor looked like that famous cave in Kentucky with the stalactites in the roof. There had been a blizzard on the twenty-third and I couldn't go to the church Christmas tree. It was nearly as bad the Christmas before. I've never celebrated Christmas day, except to plant a little hemlock twig in a flower pot and hang Mother's and Father's pictures on it." "Jehosaphat!" ejaculated Rufus. "It wasn't so bad as that in the trenches where I was. Plenty of company--of one sort and another; I declare women always have the hardest of it in this old world somehow. Trenches and over-the-tops were exciting compared to what you've gone through. They were _life_! A man generally has life and adventure with his hard knocks; but women are always saving, scrimping, doing without, suffering, nursing, burying, paying other people's debts and bearing other people's burdens. Rotten luck, being a woman!" and he knocked the ashes from his pipe furiously. "I never thought of it that way," said Jenny serenely. "I have my one burden, but it's my own, nobody else's!" "Say, if I'm hereabouts to help, suppose you give a kind of a housewarming this year; some sort of a make-shift Christmas and show off the shingles! Hey?" "Who would come?" cried Jenny. "And how could I compete with the church Christmas? Besides you are going to Boston."