Pat looked out of the Little Parlor window a bit wistfully one evening in late November. Another summer was ended. How quickly summers passed now! There was a hard gray twilight after a little snow and there was a threat of still more snow in the dour air. The shadows…chilly, hostile shadows…seemed to be raining out of the silver bush. A biting wind was lashing everything as if determined to take its ill-temper out on the world. A few forlorn yellow leaves blew crazily over the lawn. An empty nest swung lonesomely in the wind from a bough of the big apple tree on which the pale yellow-green apples always stayed so long after the leaves were gone. The apples were no good and were never picked but the tree always looked so exquisite in its spring blossom that Pat wouldn’t have it cut down. It had been what Pat called a peevish day and even the loveliness of a tall, dark spruce tree near the dyke, powdered with feathers of snow, did not give her the shiver of delight such things usually did. She thought it was the kind of a day that would make people quarrel if people ever quarreled at Silver Bush. But November had been a vexing month all through…one day glorious…the next day savage. You never knew just where you were with it. And Pat did not like this evening…she felt as if some long finger of change which was always reaching out to her was at last just on the point of touching her.