e lived here same as
they did. It's like killing them all again to go away and sell the house
to strangers."

There was a silence and then, "Oh, Nathaniel, what 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
tomorrow, 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 the bygone
dwellers in the old house, that through her eyes they still saw the
infinitely dear and familiar scenes, something in her own attitude
reminded her of how her father had looked as he stood every morning at
that same window and speculated on the weather. For a moment she had an
almost dizzy conviction that he did in all reality stand there again.

Then she heard the doctor saying, "I'm coming over there myself when you
start for the station, to see that you're well wrapped up. The least
exposure----" He looked at Mrs. Prentiss's broad and obstinate back,
turned, to her husband, and tapped his chest significantly.

After he had gone the room was intensely quiet. Mr. Prentiss sat by the
fire, looking vacantly a