“I should think we wouldn’t quarrel,” said Pat indignantly. “It would be terrible to have quarrels at Silver Bush. I hope we never, never will have.”

“You’ll be a fortunate family then,” said Tillytuck. “There ain’t many families but have a ruction once in a while.”

“I think I would die if any of us quarreled,” said Pat. “We leave that to people like the Binnies.”

Hope died hard in the matter of Joe but the days passed without any word of him or his ship. It was over three years since Joe had been home and Pat always knew, when she surprised a certain look in mother’s eyes, that she was longing for her sailor boy. It would shadow mother’s Christmas a bit if Joe didn’t get home in time for it.

Pat had hoped for a fine Christmas day, clear and crisp, with a crackle of frost and unspoiled fields of snow and caps of lovely white fur on the posts down the lane: but she felt dubious as she took her last look from the kitchen door late on Christmas Eve. She and Judy had stayed up to make the stuffing for “the birds” but Judy was now folding weary hands for slumber in the kitchen chamber and Tillytuck had gone to sleep, perchance to snore, in the granary loft. A snarling, quarrelsome wind was fighting with the white birches and wailing around the barns. It did not sound like a fine day on the morrow but one must hope for the best, as Judy said. Pat shut out the chill of the winter night and paused a moment in the warm old kitchen to gloat over things in general. Everything she loved best was safe under her roof. The house seemed breathing softly and contentedly in its sleep. Life was very sweet.

Pat’s hopes for a fine day were vain. Christmas morning dawned on a dreadful combination of fog and rain. Rain by itself, Pat always thought, was an honest thing…fog lovely and eerie…but together they were horrible. Tillytuck agreed with her.

“It’s fogging, Judy,” he said dolefully when he came in for breakfast. “Fogging hard. I can put up with a rainy day but I can’t come these half-and-halfs, like a woman who never knows her own mind. No, sir.”

“Oh, oh, and I’m not knowing what’s to be done, wid people tramping all over me clane floor in dirty boots,” said Judy viciously.

“We’ll just have to do as they do in Nova Scotia, Judy.”

Judy bit.

“Oh, oh, and what is it they do in Novy Scoshy, if a body may ask?”