His face as the door opened was apologetic. Walter Vail knew how to put himself on the right footing. I thought you might not let me, he said. So I just came.

Lilian found herself in the unusual position of putting him at ease. She had on her walking coat and was, she told him, just going out.

Oh, then I — He turned as if hearing a terrible shriek then wheeled back around. Let me come?

She was motoring out to Concord where there was a good nursery. She never sent the gardener, not trusting him with the flowering plants, and besides, there was nothing like walking into a huge greenhouse with its humid smell of earth and petals and leaves. Why not let Walter Vail come? What did it matter?

Though she drove, it was Walter Vail who gave off the aura, as he always had, of leading her, of having arranged the world this way as a spectacle for her — the snow on the ground in shallow hammocks off Route 2, the light and shadow sharp on the snow, the chalky roads. It was a stark world. They spoke of Hawthorne, trying to recall the name of the cemetery where he was buried with Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. Lilian remembered where it was, having visited with Jane Olney one fall. They’d come upon a group of boys from a nearby prep school smoking behind a tomb. Sleepy Hollow, that was it.

They came into town at the end of Main Street, the picket fences up close to the square Colonial houses, the white church spire shooting up. The town was quiet, Tuesday afternoon, with little signs of life, an old woman shaped like a C on the sidewalk, and farther down, coming out of a bakery, a younger woman with a child, both of them eating rum drops. It was a town of solitary women, and normally Lilian would have been one of them.

At Magneson’s they walked down the gravel aisles and Walter Vail strolled off as Lilian picked out geraniums with small leaves and bud clusters and chose a shorter palm over a larger for its stem. The man in the oilskin apron referred to Walter Vail as her husband. Your husband said you wanted hyacinth bulbs, it gave her a peculiar feeling.

Instead of taking a right when they drove back to the roundabout by the church, Lilian turned left, past the inn and headed, at Walter Vail’s urging, to Sleepy Hollow. The high iron gate was chained shut, but there was enough space to walk through, so they parked the car on the road. Lilian took off her overcoat and lay it over the flowers in the back.

Won’t you be cold? he said, though she wore a jacket underneath.

I hardly feel it, she said. Besides, they’ll die, I won’t. And indeed she felt nothing whatsoever in the still air.