separate from yours, and they
know it. The boy crept up jealously, thrust his numb fingers into his
mother's hand. She started, looking down.

"It grows into a clear winter's night, Jemmy," trying to speak
carelessly.

So they stood looking out together. The fire had burned down into a
great bed of flameless coals, the kitchen glowed warm and red, throwing
out even a patch of ruddy light on the snow-covered yard without. A
cold, but comfortable home-look out there: the bit of garden, fences,
cow-house, pump, heaped with the snow; old Dolly asleep in her stable:
Jem wrapped himself in his mother's skirt with a sudden relish of warm
snugness. What made her pull at Ready's neck with such nervous jerks?
She saw nothing beyond? Jem stood on tiptoe, peering out. There was no
hint of the hailstorm they had prophesied, in the night: the moon stood
lower now in the sky, filling the air with a yellow, frosty brilliance.
Yet something strangely cold, dead, unfamiliar, in the night yonder,
chilled him. Neither sound nor motion there; hills, river, and fields,
distinct, sharply cut in pallor, but ghost-like: it made him afraid.
There seemed to be no end of them; the hills to the north ran low, and
beyond them he could see more blue and cold and distance, going on--who
could tell where? to the eternal ice and snow, it might be. She felt it,
he knew. The boy was frightened, tried to pull her back to the fire,
when something he saw outside made him stop suddenly. Shag's Hill, the
nearest of the ledge to the house, is a low, narrow cone, with a sharp
rim against the sky; the moon had sunk half behind it, lighting the
surface of drifted snow which faced them. Across this there suddenly
fell a long, uncertain shadow, which belonged neither to bush nor tree:
it might be the flicker of a cloud; or a man, passing across the top of
the hill, would make it. It was nothing; some of the coal-diggers from
the Point going home; he pulled at her petticoat again.

"Come to the fire, dear," he said, looking up.

Her whole face and neck were hot; she laughed and trembled as if some
spasm were upon her.

"Do you see?" she cried, trying to force the window open. "Oh, Jemmy, it
might be! it might!"

Jem was used to his mother's unaccountable whims of mood. Ready,
however, startled him. The dog pricked up his ears, sniffed the air once
or twice, then, after a grave pause of a minute, with a sharp howl, such
as Jem had not heard him give for years,