Two bowls of blue Glebeshire pottery, cheap things but precious, a box plastered with coloured shells, an amber bead necklace, a blue leather writing-case, a photograph of her father as a young clergyman with a beard and whiskers, a faded daguerreotype of her mother, last, but by no means least, a small black lacquer musical-box that played two tunes, "Weel may the Keel row" and "John Peel,"-- these were her worldly possessions.
She sat there; as the day closed down, the trees were swept into the night, the wind rose in the dark wood, the winter's moon crept pale and cold into the sky, snow began to fall, at first thinly, then in a storm, hiding the moon, flinging the fields and roads into a white shining splendour; the wind died and the stars peeped between the flakes of whirling snow.
She sat without moving, accusing her heart of hardness, of unkindness.
She seemed to herself then deserving of every punishment.

"If I had only gone to him," she thought again and again.

She remembered how she had kept apart from him, enclosed herself in a reserve that he should never break.

She remembered the times when he had scolded her, coldly, bitterly, and she had stood, her face as a rock, her heart beating but her body without movement, then had turned and gone silently from the room.

All her wicked, cold heart that in some strange way cared for love but could not make those movements towards others that would show that it cared.