John’s visit, that Christina had looked forward to so happily since Thanksgiving, proved an uneasy and rather tense one. He found Jane Tuttle enormously diminished in energy since he had seen her last, only three weeks before, swallowed up in the ministrations of Hannah, no longer able to react as she used to do with humorous self-assertion. “She is slipping away,” John said. “I find it hard to bear.”

He had brought her a rough draft of the chapter on flora and fauna, but the effort of taking it in had been clearly beyond her powers. She had laid it aside with a perfunctory compliment, very unlike her.

“Thank you, dear boy, for doing my work for me,” was what she said.

Christina guessed that it had been hard on John to be left high and dry when he had worked so hard to please Jane, and at the same time to have to be gentle and patient with Cornelius, who was irritable, complained about John’s driving, and was generally cross the whole way down.

“Mother, you are a tower of strength,” he had said that night after supper when Cornelius was safely in bed at the hospital where some tests were to be made the next morning.

“No! Good heavens, I feel so bumbling, John! I should have got your father a wheel chair months ago. It just seems as if each day got eaten up moment by moment.”

“You should have help,” Sybille said, as if that would solve everything.

“Yes, that is what everyone says,” Christina said quietly, “but the village itself is our help, you know. The Lovelands will always manage to come if I really need them, and Nick—he has been wonderful. He’s so quiet— we hardly know he is there, but we find the woodbox full and the paths shoveled when we get up. What we have is peace and quiet.”

John gave her a penetrating look. Peace and quiet were not what his mother had ever seemed to want before.

Christina was firm about having a Christmas alone this year.

“Please don’t be hurt,” she said, “but somehow I feel this is the right thing.”

She did not add that after one is seventy, Christmas becomes an increasing strain, a kind of yearly ordeal that must be surmounted.