basement
door, and showing, under an adjoining shed, a line of sleighs with
heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave
little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of
a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than
ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic
dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted receiver," he
thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year's course at a
technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with
a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that
experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally
different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His
father's death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature
end to Ethan's studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be
of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in
his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp.
At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the
church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and
down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of
the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite
coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner
rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled
darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay
on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church
windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands
of yellow light.

The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope
toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays
from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually
approached the farther angle of the basement wall. Thence, still hugging
the shadow, he edged his way cautiously forward to the nearest window,
holding back his straight spare body and craning his neck till he got a
glimpse of the room.

Seen thus, from the pure and frosty darkness in which he stood, it
seemed to be seething in a mist of heat. The metal reflectors of the
gas-jets sent crude