When the leaves fell and the furnace was on, Mr Newman had waited a long time. Northern man that he was, he looked forward to the changing of seasons as the time of renewal and change, and yet in the new cold of winter he had no more of an answer than he had had the night he was thrown out of the hall.

There was, however, a strange quiet chord sounding in him with the arrival of this winter. The wind came this time like a soft yet impassable fortification around him, a natural force that kept people off the streets and safely locked away in the sensible regimes of their families. Never had he thought of winter in this way, and he liked the feeling it gave him. The city and the block were turning in upon their warm radiators, and he would be left alone sitting next to his.

Perhaps he would have been content, or nearly so, to go on living without love and yet with this steam-heated peace, but one night came that was so strikingly beautiful as to bring back his longing for the extraordinary ecstasy he had once envisioned beside his wife. It was that rare, still night when the stars cast their own shadows on the ground and the sky is cloudless and the sharp air does not move. The tree in the back yard, which he could see through the panes in the kitchen door, looked as though iced by the stars. Behind his chair the radiator fizzed. Gertrude was drinking coffee across the table. His mother was having hers by the radio in the parlor. He sipped, not daring to raise his eyes to his wife’s – it had become a habit. The lower in the cups the coffee sank, the lower sank their eyes, as though it should not come to pass that they find themselves face to face once no external reason remained.

But tonight, whether it was the stillness outside or the way Gertrude was made up, he thought her beautiful, and instead of rising to go into the living room where Mother would make conversation between them comfortably impossible, he set his cup down, and feeling he would cry he said, ‘Gert,’ in the deep-voiced way he had of letting bars fall away.

She raised her eyes, hurt before he began -having caught the plea in his tone.

He was smiling softly, kindly. ‘I often think,’ he said, picking at a crumb on the maple table, ‘how silly we are. Really, Gert,’ he laughed minutely, ‘we’ve got everything, you know? How about forgetting everything and enjoying ourselves again?’

She agreed with him and so it seemed necessary that she appear to dissent.

‘We go places,’ she said with a sigh.

‘I know, but we don’t enjoy ourselves. Now, do we?’

‘I guess not,’ she whispered sadly.

‘I often think of what we have,’ he warmed quickly, ‘a nice house all paid for, good jobs … How about making up?’