At night the center of the village was as still as the grave, inhabited as Willard was chiefly by the old. Ellen and Nick rarely had lights on after ten, and then the only sound was an occasional car, a worker on his way home from the night shift at the mill a few miles down the road, or one of the big trucks routed through the village to avoid the town. And of course the snowplows at it all night after a blizzard. But on this night in mid-April Ellen could hear only the brook roaring down below the meadow. For a half hour before she went to sleep she lay there in the dark thinking about Cathy. She couldn’t help worrying, because any human creature as open and vulnerable as Cathy is bound to get hurt—that is for sure. And all this talk of working among the poor could lead to no good in Ellen’s view—cities were dangerous places these days, especially for a girl alone. People who set out to change the world only got hurt like Nick, and often did more harm than good. If everyone looked after his own, the world wouldn’t be such a sorry place. But that was the trouble these days with the whole world coming right into the house and all the suffering with it. People knew more about children starving in Africa than about the neighbors a few miles away, and that’s an upside-down, roundabout state of affairs.

Ellen sighed a deep sigh and turned over to shut out gloomy thoughts. “Cart before the horse” was her last lucid comment to herself.

It must have been an hour later when she opened her eyes in the dark, wide awake. Had she dreamed it—a voice? No, there it was.

“Please someone … turn on a light.”

The voice sounded thick and strange. Some drunk on the loose, no doubt.

But then it shouted again: “Please someone, turn on a light!”

And when the eerie cry repeated itself once more, Ellen was up, calling out, “Nick! Nick! Did you hear that?”

She felt her way downstairs. Nick was too fast asleep to know what was going on. She didn’t dare put on a light, just stood back of the door, listening.

She could hear footsteps on the road, crunching the snow, and then again the desperate, lost sound. This time she felt sure it was a young man’s voice, and, against her better judgment, Ellen turned on the hall light and shoved back the bolt on the door. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before whoever it was pushed his way in without even knocking and fell headlong onto the kitchen floor.

By this time Nick was aware that something was happening and came down in his bathrobe, his hair standing on end, bewildered as an owl.

“What’s this, Mother?”