One circumstance, however, very materially lessened the possible encounters between the bond-servant and the maiden.  This was no less than the setting in of the winter snows, which put a termination to all the girl’s outdoor life, excepting the attendance at the double church services on Sundays, which Mrs. Meredith never permitted to be neglected.  From the window Janice sometimes saw the groom playing in the drifts with Clarion, but that was almost the extent of her knowledge of his doings.  It is to be confessed that she eagerly longed to join them or, at least, to have a like sport with the dog.  Eighteenth-century etiquette, however, neither countenanced such conduct in the quality, nor, in fact, clothed them for it.

A point worth noting at this time was connected with one window of the parlour.  Each afternoon as night shut down, it was Peg’s duty to close all the blinds, for colonial windows not being of the tightest, every additional barricade to Boreas was welcome, and this the servant did with exemplary care.  But every evening after tea, Janice always walked to a particular window and, opening the shutter, looked out for a moment, as if to see what the night promised, before she took her seat at her tambour frame or sewing.  Sometimes one of her parents called attention to the fact that she had not quite closed the shutters again, and she always remedied the oversight at once.  Otherwise she never looked at the window during the whole evening, glance where she might.  Presumably she still remembered the fright her putative ghost had occasioned her, and chose not to run the chance of another sight of him.  Almost invariably, however, in the morning she blew on the frost upon the window of her own room and having rubbed clear a spot, looked below, much as if she suspected ghosts could leave tracks in the snow.  In her behalf it is only fair to say that the girls of that generation were so shut in as far as regarded society or knowledge of men that they let their imaginations question and wander in a manner difficult now to conceive.  At certain ages the two sexes are very much interested in each other, and if this interest is not satisfied objectively, it will be subjectively.

Snow, if a jailer, was likewise a defence, and apparently cooled for a time the heat of the little community against the squire.  Even the Rev. Mr. McClave’s flame of love and love of flame were modified by the depth of the drifts he must struggle through, in order to discourse on eternal torment while gazing at earthly paradise.  Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become things of the past.