She had left them, but glancing up at the sky as she paused on the bridge she saw it was an unbroken luminous pale grey, very low, and almost trembling with a burden of unshed snowflakes. The air was still and icily raw, and before she was halfway across the Common the first large flakes were slowly floating about. She collected Alice from Molly and got home as it began to settle on the ground. She called the hens, sacrificing a little corn to entice them in and up to the shelf of nests. She propped their pole up inside so that they could get down to the goat’s drinking butt and up again to their nests. She tried to close the trap door over the smoke-hole in the cottage roof, but the leather hinges were frozen stiff and it would neither open nor close properly. She busied herself with the fire and with food, and when she looked out again over the half-door even the garden had vanished into the twirling snowflakes and the nearby ground was all soft white hillocks. Peterkin arrived home through it. He had been on some mission for Rollo at the Hall and Martin had found him snowballing with Kit Nickson on the Green and had firmly dragged him away and accompanied him back over the Common. Peterkin had come in with his hood and tunic plastered with snow, which was beginning to freeze into the fabric. His good boot was not waterproof, and the other boot, an improvised affair to accommodate his twisted foot, had filled with snow. He was pale and his teeth chattered. Marion pulled off his frozen clothes and put a blanket round him and he sat on the floor by the fire leaning against the log and breathing with long trembling breaths not far from sobbing. She noticed how thin his legs were, almost with waists above his square boy’s knees. How perilous were children’s lives! She told him, in spite of her concern, that he was a silly boy to go snowballing and should have come straight home, and he had replied he had not thought snow could be so cold.

Peter did not come home that night. Marion had guessed he would not be able to. The wind had got up, and the unceasing snow had piled up against the cottage walls, the ash tree and the garden fences. She had looked out the next morning and all was magical. The garden was obliterated under an undulating slope of white with occasionally a bent thistle-stalk projecting. Up in the woods, the tree trunks were all plastered on their western sides with a crust of snow. The black yew trees had splayed open, each branch with its burden of snow, and every little twig in the undergrowth carried a thin vertical wall of white. The air was still now, the sky an unmoving grey. All was utterly silent. Feeling Alice’s hands on her skirt, Marion bent and lifted her up so she could see out over the half-door. Alice was astounded.