The moon was just up above the fringe of trees at the east and shadows were black across the snow. She sat looking out with intentness as if she were there at the window for the sole purpose of watching the silent world, but really to get her mind in order for the next day and all the coming days. She felt about the heart the strange dropping we know as grief. No wonder the mortal creature, looking on at the commotions within the frail refuge of his body, should have evolved the age-old phrase that the heart bleeds. Nan's heart had been bleeding a long time. There used to be drops on each shock of her meeting Raven after absence and finding herself put away from the old childish state of delighted possession. At first, she had believed this was one of the mysterious cruelties of Aunt Anne's inexorable delicacy of behavior; but when she grew older she had one day a great happy light of understanding, one of those floods that sweep over youth after washing at the barriers of its innocence. Rookie himself had put her away. It was one of the scrupulous things he had done for her, because she had been too ignorant to do them for herself. He had seen she was grown-up. It was true, Nan had to own, that this was one of the lines, drawn across her life, that pleased Aunt Anne most, because it removed her (or seemed to remove her) from Rookie. Aunt Anne was jealous to her fingertips, the ends of those beautiful, delicately prisoning hands. Nan had tried never to acknowledge that. It always seemed such a barbarity to find in Aunt Anne the things that would have shocked her in herself.