On a certain night in the December following the engagement of Marcella
Boyce to Aldous Raeburn, the woods and fields of Mellor, and all the
bare rampart of chalk down which divides the Buckinghamshire plain from
the forest upland of the Chilterns lay steeped in moonlight, and in the
silence which belongs to intense frost.

Winter had set in before the leaf had fallen from the last oaks; already
there had been a fortnight or more of severe cold, with hardly any snow.
The pastures were delicately white; the ditches and the wet furrows in
the ploughed land, the ponds on Mellor common, and the stagnant pool in
the midst of the village, whence it drew its main water supply, were
frozen hard. But the ploughed chalk land itself lay a dull grey beside
the glitter of the pastures, and the woods under the bright sun of the
days dropped their rime only to pass once more with the deadly cold of
the night under the fantastic empire of the frost. Every day the veil of
morning mist rose lightly from the woods, uncurtaining the wintry
spectacle, and melting into the brilliant azure of an unflecked sky;
every night the moon rose without a breath of wind, without a cloud; and
all the branch-work of the trees, where they stood in the open fields,
lay reflected clean and sharp on the whitened ground. The bitter cold
stole into the cottages, marking the old and feeble with the touch of
Azrael; while without, in the field solitudes, bird and beast cowered
benumbed and starving in hole and roosting place.

How still it was--this midnight--on the fringe of the woods! Two men
sitting concealed among some bushes at the edge of Mr. Boyce's largest
cover, and bent upon a common errand, hardly spoke to each other, so
strange and oppressive was the silence. One was Jim Hurd; the other was
a labourer, a son of old Patton of the almshouses, himself a man of
nearly sixty, with a small wizened face showing sharp and white to-night
under his slouched hat.

They looked out over a shallow cup of treeless land to a further bound
of wooded hill, ending towards the north in a bare bluff of down shining
steep under the moon. They were in shadow, and so was most of the wide
dip of land before them; but through a gap to their right, beyond the
wood, the moonbeams poured, and the farms nestling under the opposite
ridge, the plantations ranging along it, and the bald beacon hill in
which it broke to the plain, were all in radiant light.

Not a stir of life