When the stove was putting out noticeable heat again, she made her way to the hearth and repeated the process, feeling a certain primitive joy as the flames leaped up around the fresh logs, crackling cheerfully and spilling warmth over her bare feet.

She lingered a few minutes, in silent celebration, then hurried back to bed, nearly tripping over Hortense in the process. Finally, Evangeline was able to sleep, and when she woke up, the cabin was frigidly cold and she could hear the stove lids clattering. Abigail?

Evangeline sat up in bed, shivering. Abigail was burrowed down in the covers beside her, still sleeping, with Hortense curled in her arms. “Scully?” she whispered. She’d dared to hope he would survive the night; she had not dared to hope he would be up and about with the dawn. Some things were too much to ask, even of God.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, in a loud whisper.

Evangeline had never been good at taking orders. She threw back the covers, despite the fact that she could see her breath in the air, and hopped across a floor that stung the soles of her feet. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Getting the fire going again,” he answered. He sounded grim, and little wonder. In the first thin gray light of dawn, he looked as pale and ethereal as a specter. “Damn it, Evangeline, do you ever listen to anybody?”

She took his arm and steered him back to the cot. “Only when they’re making sense,” she replied. “You’re the one who ought to be in bed. You almost died last night, in case it escaped your notice.”

“That was last night,” he grumbled. But he stretched out on the cot, and allowed her to cover him.

Evangeline finished building the fire. “How do you feel?” she asked. She had her back to him, and though she knew it wasn’t right for him to see her in her nightdress, there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it for the moment.

“Like somebody whipped the hide off me and then rolled me down a rocky hillside like a log,” Scully answered. When she glanced back at him, he’d raised himself onto one elbow. “I’d best go back to sleeping in the barn,” he said. “You don’t need me to protect you.”

She knew it was supposed to be a compliment, his allowing that she could take care of herself and Abigail, and she knew also that what he’d said was true, for the most part, but the idea of his going even so far as the little room out in the barn gave her a sense of desolation that was dizzying in its force. “You’ll stay right here until you’re strong enough to look after yourself properly,” she said. “I didn’t go to all the trouble of keeping you alive just to see you freeze to death in some—some outbuilding.”

“The animals give off some heat, out there in the barn,” Scully said. “Seems to me, I have a better chance of freezing to death in here.”