V


It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly
cleared the streets the day before, but now they were traversed
again with a powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy
lines before the feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with
a fine-particled mist. There was no sky-- only a dark, ominous
tent that draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a
vast approaching army of snowflakes--while over it all, chilling
away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted
windows and muffling the steady trot of the horse pulling their
sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. It was a dismal town
after all, she though, dismal.

Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived
here--they had all gone long ago--leaving lighted houses to be
covered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be
snow on her grave! To be beneath great piles of it all winter
long, where even her headstone would be a light shadow against
light shadows. Her grave--a grave that should be flower-strewn
and washed with sun and rain.

She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train
had passed, and of the life there the long winter through--the
ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the
soft drifts of snow, finally the slow cheerless melting and the