Miss Winter died and the snow kept falling. When Judith came she stood with me for a time at the window, ached the eerie illumination of the night sky. Then, when an alteration in the whiteold us it was m, she seo bed.
I awoke at the end of the afternoon.
The snow that had already deadehe telephone now reached the window ledges and drifted half the doors. It separated us from the rest of the world as effectively as a prison key. Miss Winter had escaped; so had the woman Judith referred to as Emmeline, and whom I avoided naming. The rest of us, Judith, Maurid I, were trapped.
The cat was restless. It was the snout him out; he did not like this ge in the appearance of his universe. He went from one windowsill to another in search of his lost world, and meowed urgently at Judith, Maurid me, as though its restoration was in our hands. In parison, the loss of his mistresses was a small matter that, if he noticed it at all, left him fually undisturbed.
The snow had blockaded us into a sideways extension of time, and we each found our own way of enduring it. Judith, imperturbable, made vegetable soup, ed the kit cupboards out and, when she ran out of jobs, manicured her nails and did a face pack. Maurice, chafing at the fi and the inactivity, played endless games of solitaire, but when he had to drink his tea black for lailk, Judith played rummy with him to distract him from the bitterness.
As for me, I spent two days writing up my final notes, but when that was done, I found I could not settle to reading. Even Sherloes could not reach me in the snowlocked landscape. Alone in my room I spent an hour examining my melancholy, trying to name what I thought was a new element in it. I realized that I missed Miss Winter. So, hopeful of human pany, I made my way to the kit. Maurice was glad to play cards with me, even though I knew only children』s games. Then, when Judith』s nails were drying, I made the cocoa and tea with no milk, and later let Judith file and polish my own nails.
In this way, we three and the cat sat out the days, locked in with our dead, and with the old year seeming to linger on past its time.
On the fifth day I allowed myself to be overe by a vast sorrow.
I had dohe washing up, and Maurice had dried while Judith played solitaire at the table. We were all glad of a ge. And when the washing up was done, I took myself away from their pany to the drawing room. The window looked out onto the part of the garden that was in the lee of the house. Here the snow did not drift so high. I opened a window, climbed out into the whiteness and walked across the snow. All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. On a bench sheltered by a tall hedge of yew I abandoned myself to a sorrow that was wide and deep as the snow itself, and as untainted. I cried for Miss Winter, for her ghost, for Adeline and Emmeline. For my sister, my mother and my father. Mostly, and most terribly, I cried for myself. My grief was that of the infant, newly severed from her other half; of the child bent over an old tin, making sudden, shog sense of a few pieces of paper; and of a grown woman, sitting g on a ben the halluatory light and silence of the snow.
When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there. He put an arm around me. 「I know,」 he said. 「I know.」
He didn』t know, of course. Not really. Ahat was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what