With January the reign of the North Wind began in a wrath of sleet and ice that bound forest, field, and river also in cruel, glittering shackles, covering the wayside granaries and driving the faithful birds of the season, hooded and clad in sober garb of grays and russet, to beg from door to door like mendicant friars of old. Even before its close, each day of the New Year had been checked by a double cross from the calendar that hung on the door of Keith West’s pantry, as if by its complete obliteration she hoped to hurry time itself. Waiting for others to act had never before fallen to Miss Keith’s lot in life. For twenty years her comings and goings, her waking and sleeping, and even the setting of the first spring brood of embryo broilers had depended upon herself alone, for she had long since substituted an incubator for that coy and freakish feathered female known as a setting hen. Consequently this delay at the very outset of a new order of things found her restless and in no very amiable mood. Also Judith Dow had written that, as Miss Keith had promised to come the first of the year, she had reserved her room and must charge her accordingly, which, as the whole affair was upon a nominal basis, irritated her not a little. In writing to Adam Lawton of the determination to leave the farm, the 1st of January had been the date she had set for starting for Boston _en route_ to Matrimony, and when, a short time after Christmas, Brooke had combined her reply to the unanswered letter with the announcement that she herself expected to go to take charge of the place as near the 1st of January as possible, Miss Keith had hastened to complete her arrangements. Brooke had written concisely, yet with entire frankness; but even then Miss Keith did not compass the exact condition of her cousin’s affairs, or understand that as far as his relation with the world stood he was as helpless and irresponsible as the day of his birth. She knew that money and health had been lost, but fancied that, after a few months’ retirement, more voluntary than enforced, as had been the case with one or two families of the wealthy summer colony at Stonebridge, every one concerned would swing back to the old pace again. Nevertheless she took great pride in making the evidence of her thrifty stewardship apparent on every side. The hired man had been well-nigh frantic at the number of times that he had been obliged to whitewash spots that had dried thin in the cow and poultry houses. A fringe of unthreshed rye straw made a lambrequin over the entrance to the stall of Billy, the general utility horse with the long, common-sense face. The front gate, always removed from its hinges at the coming of frost, had been scrubbed before being stowed away in the attic, and the plant boxes that edged the front porch and held nasturtiums in summer were filled with small cedar bushes and branches of coral winterberry in remembrance of Brooke’s youthful love of such things.