"Sit down at that table," he said again, and his voice had gone gentle in a way that surprised them both. "There is ham left, and bread, and I saved back a portion of that pudding before those three locusts got to it, because some part of me must have known, even before I let myself know it. You are not scrubbing another pan tonight. You are going to sit down at my table, and I am going to serve you for once, and you are going to eat a Christmas dinner while I sit with you, because it is Christmas, and because there is no one on this earth who has earned one more than you have this day. And he took her gently by the shoulders, and he steered her to the chair at the foot of the table.
Her chair now. And he sat her down in it, and he went and fixed her a plate with his own clumsy hands, ham and bread and the pudding he had hidden back, and he set it in front of her, and he sat down in the chair beside her, not across, beside. And he watched her eat. And Adeline Rou, who had gone without so that others might have, who had made an art her whole life long of needing nothing and asking for nothing, sat at that table on Christmas night and let a good man serve her a plate of food and sit beside her while she ate it. And it was, she thought, though she could not have said it aloud, the first time in more years than she cared to count that anyone had looked at her and seen not a pair of useful hands, but a person.
A person who might herself be tired, be hungry, be worthy of being served instead of always serving. She wept a little quietly over that plate. She could not help it. And Caleb did the kind thing which he had learned from watching her do it, and looked hard at the fire, and let her have it unwatched. By the fire, the three children slept, warm and full.
Outside, the snow had begun to come down soft and thick, the deep quiet snow of Christmas night, filling the dark yard and rounding the hard edges of that struggling ranch into something gentle. And inside at the long table, a man and a woman who had each thought their hearts closed for good sat side by side in the lamplight and did not say a great deal because a great deal did not need saying. She stayed, of course. She stayed through that winter as had been agreed, and then it was spring and the roads were good and the cousin in Bishop's Ford was mentioned by no one. And she stayed through the spring and the stock sold and the note was paid and there was money again.
And Caleb took some of that first money and he rode the four miles into Cottonwood Bend and he went to Prudence Gale and he bought back the locket which she had not yet sold on and he brought it home and he did not make a ceremony of it. He simply set it on the table by Adeline's place one evening without a word. She looked at it a long time. Then she looked at him. "You did not have to," she said.