“We’d better keep the water in the kitchen runnin’ to-night.  The pipes’ll freeze.”

Tick-tock.  Tick.  Tock.  She had not moved, still sitting staring above the top of his head.  He slid out his watch, yawning.

“Well, if you think it’s too raw for the movin’ pictures, Hanna, I guess I’ll be movin’ up to bed.  I got to be down to meet a five-o’clock shipment of fifty bales to-morrow.  I’ll be movin’ along unless there’s anything you want?”

“No—­nothing.”

“If—­if you ain’t sleepy awhile yet, Hanna, why not run over to Widow Dinninger’s to pass the time of evenin’?  I’ll keep the door on the latch.”

She sprang up, snatching a heavy black shawl, throwing it over her and clutching it closed at the throat.

“Where you goin’, Hanna?”

“Walkin’,” she said, slamming the door after her.

In Adalia, chiefly remarkable for the Indestructo Safe Works and a river which annually overflows its banks, with casualties, the houses sit well back from tree-bordered streets, most of them frame, shingle-roofed veterans that have lived through the cycle-like years of the bearing, the marrying, the burying of two, even three, generations of the same surname.

A three-year-old, fifteen-mile traction connects the court-house with the Indestructo Safe Works.  High Street, its entire length, is paved.  During a previous mayoralty the town offered to the Lida Tool Works a handsome bonus to construct branch foundries along its river-banks, and, except for the annual flood conditions, would have succeeded.

In spring Adalia is like a dear old lady’s garden of marigold and bleeding-heart.  Flushes of sweetpeas ripple along its picket fences and off toward the backyards are long grape-arbors, in autumn their great fruit-clusters ripening to purple frost.  Come winter there is almost an instant shriveling to naked stalk, and the trellis-work behind vines comes through.  Even the houses seem immediately to darken of last spring’s paint, and, with windows closed, the shades are drawn.  Oftener than not Adalia spends its evening snugly behind these drawn shades in great scoured kitchens or dining-rooms, the house-fronts dark.

When Mrs. Burkhardt stepped out into an evening left thus to its stilly depth, shades drawn against it, a light dust of snow, just fallen, was scurrying up-street before the wind, like something phantom with its skirts blowing forward.  Little drifts of it, dry as powder, had blown up against the porch.  She sidestepped them, hurrying down a wind-swept brick walk and out a picket gate that did not swing entirely after.  Behind her, the house with its wimple of shingle roof and unlighted front windows seemed to recede somewhere darkly.  She stood an undecided moment, her face into the wind.  Half down the block an arc-light swayed and gave out a moving circle of light.  Finally she turned her back and went off down a side-street, past a lighted corner grocer, crossed a street to avoid the black mouth of an alley, then off at another right angle.  The houses here were smaller, shoulder to shoulder and directly on the sidewalk.