But first there were things to do—if it was real, not just a flurry. She put the car in the barn and closed the door fast; then looked up at the brown-shingled fortress. The storm windows should have been put up. Old Pete had promised to get one of the Lovelands and do it, but he put things off. Never mind; the big porch protected the house. In summer it opened up the outdoors; now it provided shelter. And she felt grateful for the standards of the carpenters and masons in those days early in the century. It had been built to stand and to withstand. She noted the carefully stacked wood on the back porch off the kitchen. It had a new meaning—not pleasure but an elemental need. If the time came when the oil truck couldn’t get up the hill, she could keep Cornelius warm. There were snowshoes in the attic, she remembered suddenly. Strange how the seasons always took one by surprise. Change was in the air—change and challenge.

“We’re winter people at last,” she said, laughing, as she brought in a tray with tea and cookies a half hour later. “Isn’t it a dream?”

“I still wish you would get a housekeeper,” Cornelius said.

“But she’d be around all the time! I’d have to cope with her.”

They had been over this a hundred times. Christina’s knee was stiff in the morning, and an invisible creature who could be summoned to help get Cornelius down would have been a help, but a person of flesh and blood, isolated here, needing to talk? No.

“Ellen, I suppose, wouldn’t come?”

“Oh, she’d come in a trice if we were in real trouble, but I can’t ask for regular help. She has her hands full.”

There were other reasons—another reason. Her relationship with Ellen must remain that of equals, Christina sensed. Something might be endangered if they became master and servant. Eben could do it because he was part of the village, and Mrs. Goodnow regarded him as family, or nearly. But she and Cornelius were set apart. It was a hard fact, but true. Only for a few years when she and Ellen had been children together, money, social position—all that—had not counted. But you don’t leave the world even in a village like this. And the world creates barriers that only passion or death can break down.

They sat in a comfortable silence now, drinking their tea.

“Have you found what you wanted?”

Jem had asked Cornelius to see what old photographs he could hunt out, and this had seemed an ideal task when Cornelius felt up to it. Lately he dozed off, Christina noticed. Either that or he went down deep into himself to some private meditation; memory, so much more vivid, took the place of the brown, faded, crinkled photographs in his lap.