“A stained-glass artist, but still,” Anna put in. She had read the books first, then lent them to me. “And Mrs. Oliphant, what a woman! Bore six children and lost three early on.” Tears gathered in her eyes. Her own daughter’s birth had been difficult two months prior, and I knew how bone-deep her fear had been that the night would end in tragedy.

“When her husband became ill with consumption,” I picked up the tale, “she moved to Italy with him for the climate. And there he died, leaving her without means to make her way back home. Yet she managed.”

“She wrote so many novels in order to support her family.” Anna glared at Piet. “And even now, after she’s lost two more children, she keeps writing because she still supports her only remaining son, and also her ruined brother and his family. Now tell me women are the weaker sex.”

The men fell silent at last.

I could barely speak past the tightness in my chest. “The thought that a mother could lose so many children is unbearable.”

I wanted to run upstairs and check on Wil.

Piet stood and opened his book. “I must concede to the ladies.” He nodded to Anna and me. “Your Mrs. Oliphant is a commendable woman. Yet we must consider quality of work as well, and not only quantity. If I may…” He began to read. “Without the house the wind was blusteringly bringing down the few leaves that remained on the trees, skirting the north side of the park, and occasionally beating in a solid mass against the sides and windows of the house, or playing with undulating shrieks round the chimney-pots.”

He lowered the book with a dramatic shiver. “Can you not feel the cold?”

I exchanged a look with Anna, my mind still half on the unfortunate but eminently admirable Mrs. Oliphant.

Piet raised the tome again. “The air was filled with a mighty rustling—”

And, well, I did shriek then—much like the wind in the book—because someone pushed in the door, and a snow-covered creature appeared.

“Janus!” Wil barreled down the stairs and into him, hugging his leg, looking with childish adoration at the man who was a giant to him.

Janus ruffled Wil’s hair, then, seeing the company, he snatched off his wet hat and gave an embarrassed greeting, adding, “I thought I would cut up that walnut tree the wind t…twisted out in the front yard yesterday.”

“Thank you, Janus.”

A squall blew snow in from the roof, and he stepped back out, closing the door behind him.

Wil looked at the closed front door, as forlorn as a child could be, then plodded up the stairs.

Piet read, “Without the house the air was grey with twilight, and hazy yellow high up around the street lamps.” He sighed. “The air was gray with twilight.” He carried his gaze around, daring us to contradict his next word. “Brilliant.”