Jennie played the piano and sang. They all joined in some simple Christmas songs. Mrs. Woodruff and Jim’s mother went into other parts of the house on research work connected with their converse on domestic economy. The colonel withdrew for an inspection of the live stock on the eve of the threatened blizzard. And Jim was left alone with Jennie in the front parlor. After the buzz of conversation, they seemed to have nothing to say. Jennie played softly, and looked at nothing, but scrutinized Jim by means of the eyes which women have concealed in their back hair. There was something new in the man—she sensed that. He was more confident, more persuasive, more dynamic. She was used to him only as a static force. And Jim felt something new, too. He had Now, however, he arose as from some inner compulsion, and went to her side. He wished that he knew enough of music to turn her sheets for her, but, alas! the notes were meaningless to him. Still scanning him by means of her back hair, Jennie knew that in another moment Jim would lay his hand on her shoulder, or otherwise advance to personal nearness, as he had done the night of his ill-starred speech at the schoolhouse—and she rose in self-defense. Self-defense, however, did not seem “It seems good to have you with us to-day,” said she. “We’re such old, old friends.” “Yes,” repeated Jim, “old friends .... We are, aren’t we, Jennie?” “And I feel sure,” Jennie went on, “that this marks a new era in our friendship.” “Why?” asked Jim, after considering the matter. “Oh! everything is different, now—and getting more different all the time. My new work, and your new work, you know.” “I should like to think,” said Jim, “that we are beginning over again.” “Oh, we are, we are, indeed! I am quite sure of it.” “And yet,” said Jim, “there is no such thing as a new beginning. Everything joins itself to something which went before. There isn’t any seam.” “No?” said Jennie interrogatively. “Our regard for each other,” Jennie noted “I hardly know what you mean,” said Jennie. Jim reached over and possessed himself of her hand. She pulled it from him gently, but he paid no attention to the little muscular protest, and examined the hand critically. On the back of the middle finger he pointed out a scar—a very tiny scar. “Do you remember how you got that?” he asked. Because Jim clung to the hand, their heads were very close together as she joined in the examination. “Why, I don’t believe I do,” said she. “I do,” he replied. “We—you and I and Mary Forsythe were playing mumble-peg, and you put your hand on the grass just as I threw the knife—it cut you, and left that scar.” “I remember, now!” said she. “How such things come back over the memory. And did it leave a scar when I pushed you toward the red-hot stove in the schoolhouse one blizzardy day, like this, and you peeled the skin off your wrist where it struck the stove?” “Look at it,” said he, baring his long and bony wrist. “Right there!” And they were off on the trail that leads back to childhood. They had talked long, and intimately, when the shadows of the early evening crept into the corners of the room. He had carried her across the flooded slew again after the big rain. They had relived a dozen moving incidents by flood and field. Jennie recalled the time when the tornado narrowly missed the schoolhouse, and frightened everybody in school nearly to death. “Everybody but you, Jim,” Jennie remembered. “You looked out of the window and told the teacher that the twister was going north of us, and would kill somebody else.” “Did I?” asked Jim. “Yes,” said Jennie, “and when the teacher asked us to kneel and thank God, you said, ‘Why should we thank God that somebody else is blowed away?’ She was greatly shocked.” “I don’t see to this day,” Jim asserted, “what answer there was to my question.” In the gathering darkness Jim again took He was trembling like a leaf. Let it be remembered in his favor that this was the only girl’s hand he had ever held. “You can’t find any more scars on it,” she said soberly. “Let me see how much it has changed since I stuck the knife in it,” begged Jim. Jennie held it up for inspection. “It’s longer, and slenderer, and whiter, and even more beautiful,” said he, “than the little hand I cut; but it was then the most beautiful hand in the world to me—and still is.” “I must light the lamps,” said the county superintendent-elect, rather flustered, it must be confessed. “Mama! Where are all the matches?” Mrs. Woodruff and Mrs. Irwin came in, and the lamplight reminded Jim’s mother that the cow was still to milk, and that the chickens might need attention. The Woodruff sleigh came to the door to carry them home; but Jim desired to breast the storm. He felt that he “He’s as odd as Dick’s hatband,” said Mrs. Woodruff, “tramping off in a storm like this.” “Did you line him up?” asked the colonel of Jennie. The young lady started and blushed. She had forgotten all about the politics of the situation. “I—I’m afraid I didn’t, papa,” she confessed. “Those brown mice of Professor Darbishire’s,” said the colonel, “were the devil and all to control.” Jennie was thinking of this as she dropped asleep. “Hard to control!” she thought. “I wonder. I wonder, after all, if Jim is not capable of being easily lined up—when he sees how foolish I think he is!” And Jim? He found himself hard to control that night. So much so that it was after “The boys can be given work in helping to operate it,” he wrote on a tablet, “which, in connection with the labor performed by the teacher, will greatly reduce the expense of operation. A skilled butter-maker, with slender white hands”—but he erased this last clause and retired. |