The fine weather lasted right up to Christmas Day. Violets bloomed against the white stones that edged the garden paths. Wallflowers wore their brown velvet in sheltered corners and, best of all, bushes of Brompton stocks in a sweetness of pink and gray scented the rich Cornish winter. Jenny and May would wander up and down the garden with Granfa, while the old man would tell in his high chant tales as long as Thomas's of by-gone Australian adventures, tales ripened in the warmth of spent sunshine, and sometimes stories of his own youth in Trewinnard with memories of maids' eyes and lads' laughter. Then in January came storm on storm, dark storms that thundered up the valley, dragging night in their wake. Lambing went on out in the blackness, a dreadful experience, Jenny thought, when Zachary came in at all hours, sometimes stained with blood in the lantern light. Jenny was scarcely aware of her husband in the daytime. The volubility which had distinguished his conversation in London was not apparent here. Indeed, he scarcely spoke except in monosyllables, and spent all his time working grimly on the farm. He did not seem to notice Jenny, and never inquired into her manner of passing the day. She was his, safe and sound in Cornwall, a handsome property like a head of fine stock. He had desired her deeply and had gained his desire. Now, slim and rosy, she was still desirable; but, as Jenny herself half recognized, too securely fastened, too easily attainable for any misgiving. She certainly had no wish for a closer intimacy, and was very thankful for the apparent indifference which he felt towards her. She would have been horrified, had he suggested sharing her walks with May, had he wanted to escort them over Trewinnard Sands, or worst of all, had he invited her to sit beside him on his Sunday drives to preach at distant chapels. He did not even bother her to come and hear him preach in Trewinnard Free Church. Yet as the weeks went by, Jenny came to think that he regarded her more than she thought at first. He often seemed to know where she had been without being informed. When she complained about Old Man Veal's spying on her, Zachary laughed oddly, not much annoyed presumably by his servant's indiscretion. Jenny tried sometimes to imagine what Trewinnard would have been like without her sister. The fancy made her shudder. With May, however, it was like a rather long, pleasantly dull holiday. February brought fair days, scattered shining celandines like pieces of gold over the garden beds, set the stiff upright daffodil buds drooping and was all too soon driven out by the bleakest March that was ever known, a fierce, detestable month of withering east winds, of starved primroses, and dauntless thrushes singing to their nests in the shaken laurustinus. Jenny began to hate the country itself now, when all she could see of it was savage and forbidding as the people it bred.