The three children and the father were ready at once, as if they had been awaiting the alarm, and with no more account of the catastrophe than they had heard through the open door to the dining-room where they had been sitting round the table playing Lotto, they hurtled out the back door and into the storm while Mrs. Henderson filled a glass with rum and told me to drink it before I went out again.

“You’re soaking wet,” she scolded me. “You should have come here first.” She tied a scarf about her head and went out after the others.

I started after her but halfway to the door shivered with mortal cold and turned back to drink the rum. It had an immediate effect on me. A bone-deep drowsiness made me nod and shake myself. I stared into the dining room from my place at the kitchen table and saw the scattered Lotto cards, the chairs pushed back, the upturned ash-tray on the floor. The alarm clock in the window sill above the sink, ticking off the minutes of my brother’s absence in the furious snow, attracted my eyes and I watched the minute hand creeping so slowly it seemed not to move at all. I closed my eyes, but the measured tick-tock stayed with me. It must have been for the briefest moment that I half fell asleep while I still heard the tinny seconds clicking into the past, and when I opened my eyes again I knew that I had dreamed of being in Miss Pride’s drawing-room where I had seen a box of ferns like that in the seventh-grade room at school. I had been alone. I felt I had just come in off the street, for cold enveloped me like a loose cloak. It was the selfishness of my dream that made me leap to my feet and run out the door, but just as I reached the bottom step, I heard voices near and Mr. Henderson came into sight, carrying Ivan’s insensible body.

“The poor little duffer,” said the man. “He was lying in the pastor’s garden.”

We kept him there that night, though Sarah and her father protested, sure he would have a fit immediately on regaining consciousness. I said I thought we should have a doctor, but Mrs. Henderson assured me that a doctor could do nothing that she could not do for the time being and that we would call one tomorrow if it were necessary. She made a bed for him on the sofa in the parlor and we sat up all night, for he was feverish and tossed so violently that he would have hurled himself to the floor if we had not been there to hold him back. Mrs. Henderson took up her knitting and worked nimbly at the heel of a sock. The room was unbearably hot and smelled of the camphor-oil on Ivan’s chest.