Dinnock smiled his crooked smile. “Well, if all the grudges around here were piled up in one heap they’d bury the village. I wouldn’t let that trouble your mind. One thing about Nick, he’s kind. Good for him to do a little work for a change.”

“You ask him,” Christina said. “Then he can say no and no one will be bothered about it.”

“I’ll do that,” Dinnock said.

Next day when Christina went down to the store for milk, most of the able-bodied men in the village were busy raking around the church and getting it battened down for winter. The last service had been at Thanksgiving, and Christina was sorry she had not been able to attend. On the road down she noticed that most porches, if they had had screens, were now boarded up. The village had a queer, closed-in, abandoned look—a little threatening. And for the first time she felt winter in her bones and that slight uneasiness before approaching isolation. Those who stayed on through the bitter cold and the snows would need each other. She almost turned in at Ellen’s door on the way back, but thought better of it. Cornelius had not been feeling well. The tug, even greater than that toward her old friend, was toward home.

As she ran up the steps calling, “Hello, darling. I’m back,” she turned a second to glance up at the mountain. The air was so still it seemed as though time itself had stopped. She lingered, taking in the leaden sky, and looked down at her garden, safely covered with pine branches, for the stillness felt ominous, not at all like the stillness before a summer storm. It smells like snow, she thought. And sure enough, weren’t those a few flakes, whispering down through the concentrated, silent cold, one by one, hardly noticeable on the ground, just a dusting of white powder that had no substance?

“Cornelius,” she said, “Cornelius, it’s snowing!”

“I could have told you that,” he answered from his chair where he was sitting wrapped in a car rug, with boxes of old photographs around him. “You don’t have to see it. I felt it—the silence.”

Christina, standing at his back, bent down and kissed him.

“How exciting,” she breathed. She couldn’t express what she felt exactly, but it was a kind of anticipation as of some moment of truth. It said “we are going to be alone.”