was exactly a year and a day since her
husband's death, and she had packed herself away in his own corner of
the settle, her hands clasped across her knees, and her red-brown eyes
brooding on the nearer embers. She was not definitely speculating on her
future, nor had she any heart for retracing the dull and gentle past.
She had simply relaxed hold on her mind; and so, escaping her, it had
gone wandering off into shadowy prophecies of the immediate years. For,
as Amelia had been telling herself for the last three months, since she
had begun to outgrow the habit of a dual life, she was not old. Whenever
she looked in the glass, she could not help noting how free from
wrinkles her swarthy face had been kept, and that the line of her mouth
was still scarlet over white, even teeth. Her crisp black hair, curling
in those tight fine rolls which a bashful admirer had once commended as
"full of little jerks," showed not a trace of gray. All this evidence
of her senses read her a fair tale of the possibilities of the morrow;
and without once saying, "I will take up a new life," she did tacitly
acknowledge that life was not over.

It was a "snapping cold" night of early spring, so misplaced as to bring
with it a certain dramatic excitement. The roads were frozen hard, and
shone like silver in the ruts. All day sleds had gone creaking past, set
to that fine groaning which belongs to the music of the year. The
drivers' breath ascended in steam, the while they stamped down the
probability of freezing, and yelled to Buck and Broad until that inner
fervor raised them one degree in warmth. The smoking cattle held their
noses low, and swayed beneath the yoke.

Amelia, shut snugly in her winter-tight house, had felt the power of the
day without sharing its discomforts; and her eyes deepened and burned
with a sense of the movement and warmth of living. To-night, under the
spell of some vague expectancy, she had sat still for a long time, her
sewing laid aside and her room scrupulously in order. She was waiting
for what was not to be acknowledged even to her own intimate self. But
as the clock struck nine, she roused herself, and shook off her mood in
impatience and a disappointment which she would not own. She looked
about the room, as she often had of late, and began to enumerate its
possibilities in case she should desire to have it changed. Amelia never
went so far as to say that change should be; she only felt that she had
still a ri