I forgot to note that Eben called just before noon. He has found a packet of letters from his great-grandmother to her husband in the Civil War—just what I had so hoped would happen. In the next days I must make a real plan of work and try to gather my thoughts together and get going at the chapter. There are also the women missionaries to be considered, and for that I must get hold of Miss Plummer. But since it is impossible to move at the moment, and more snow may come upon us, as another storm is brewing in the west, I have no care this brilliant day but to be with Cornelius in peace.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

It was two days before Christina was mobile. Nick got the big barn door clear of the tons of snow the plows had pushed up against it, and she decided to go to the village for milk and a few staples, and to stop in to see Ellen while he cleared a path to the porch and to the further woodpile out by the barn, and shoveled snow off the porch roof. If Cornelius needed something he could ring the old dinner bell she had unearthed from the attic.

She found Nick’s presence restful. He was as silent as an animal, but he noticed things, suggested, himself, that he might keep the woodbins indoors filled for her as a regular thing, said he would put up snow fences for her and corral Old Pete for the storm windows within a few days. It was just plain comforting to have Nick around. Elusive creature that he was, Christina felt she had never really seen him before—tall and lanky, with a slow, secret smile and shadowy blue eyes. It was a mystery to which she had no clue—that violence of his of only a few weeks ago.

The brilliance was such when Christina crossed over to the barn that she had to shield her eyes. White reflected white, and only the distant view of pines and hemlock, bowed down under ermine, broke up the diamond facets—on the trees one could rest one’s eyes.

The road was slippery, plowed but not yet sanded way up here, so she drove as if on tiptoe, almost skidded once, and finally went into first at the steepest part of the hill, noting as she passed that the gravestones were nearly buried, the whole cemetery become a vast white bed.

It was heartwarming to get down into the gathering of small houses, to be in the village itself, where a geranium in a window and smoke coming out of chimneys, the sound of a jeep plowing out drives—all meant human concerns and human aliveness. And by the time she knocked gently at Ellen’s door Christina was elated.