The Deacon handed the paper to Margaret, and then sat looking dumbly at her. The snow blew against the window in great felty masses; it lay so deeply over wood and field that no one had been able to gather Christmas greens; even the laurels on the hillside were weighed down and hidden. “I cannot tell her,” said Margaret; “wait until after to-morrow; she will not try to go to the Hill House as she planned, for the road is drifted over.” * * * * * There was to be a Christmas tree down at the church at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and Margaret had promised to lead the carols with the children, as a matter of course. She looked out at half-past six and shivered at the storm, but a deacon’s daughter must not quail in the face of duty,—in a small town she always shares responsibility with the minister’s wife, and just now the minister’s wife was ill. Soon Andrea came downstairs dressed in the plain black gown that she had worn when Margaret first saw her, and said that she also wished to go to church; and the two women, preceded by the Deacon, and a blinking lantern, felt, rather than saw, their way out to the sleigh. Once at the church, Andrea hid herself in the corner of an old-fashioned high pew, silently looking at the lights and the children’s happy faces. When the singing began, tears ran down her cheeks, and she made no effort to restrain them, or even wipe them away. The Deacon hurried the girls home as soon as possible, after the exercises were over, for though the storm had ceased, the thermometer had fallen, and the cold was intense. Margaret begged Andrea to share her room that night, for the house seemed inexpressibly dreary, but she refused gently, and, after kissing Margaret, went up to Waldsen’s attic room. There she moved about awhile, and finally Margaret heard her go to her own room, and in a few moments everything was still. Andrea did not sleep, however, or even undress; the music had excited her imagination. It was Christmas Eve; how many years ago was the last Christmas? She had prepared no present for Waldsen, not even a wreath for his grave. The thought distressed her out of its due proportion. Then she remembered that, under the eaves in his room, there was a sheaf of rye that he had saved to be the Christmas sheaf for their new home. She would take that up to the hill to him, and all the hungry birds would come there to-morrow for their festival. Presently it seemed to her as if the night lifted and day was dawning. Andrea found the sheaf, and, pinning a shawl about her head and shoulders, crept softly downstairs. The wind blew so that she could barely close the woodshed door behind her; at her first step she sank knee-deep in the snow. Then a sort of second sight came to aid her, and she chose the places bared by the wind in picking out her path.