Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/256

 was that?" she cried, her voice rising in a quaver of apprehension.

"The wind," said her husband, stirring the fire.

"I know. But what wind? It sounds like the first beginning of the wind over Eagle Rock, and that means snow!"

She hastened heavily to the window, and raised the shade. "There's a ring around the moon as plain as my wedding ring!" And then as she looked there clung to the window-pane a single flake of snow, showing ghastly white in the instant before it melted.

"Nathaniel, the end has come," she said solemnly. "Help me get to bed."

The next morning there was a foot of snow and the thermometer was going steadily down. When the doctor arrived, red-nosed and gasping from the knife-like thrusts of the wind over Eagle Rock, he announced that it was only eight above zero, and he brought a kindly telegram from Hiram, saying that he had started for the mountains to accompany his parents back to the city. "I envy you!" said the doctor, blowing on his stiff fingers. "Think of the bliss of being where you have only to turn a screw in your steam-radiator to escape from this beastly cold. Your son will be here on the evening train, and I'll bring him right over. You'll be ready to start to morrow, won't you? You've had all the autumn to get packed up in."

Mrs. Prentiss did not answer. She was so irrationally angry with him that she could not trust herself to speak. She stood looking out of the low window at the Necronsett, running swift and black between the white banks. She felt a wave of her old obsession that in her still lived