house with the two black Norway spruces at the gate. Opposite the
Varnum gate, where the road fell away toward the Corbury valley, the
church reared its slim white steeple and narrow peristyle. As the
young man walked toward it the upper windows drew a black arcade
along the side wall of the building, but from the lower openings, on
the side where the ground sloped steeply down to the Corbury road,
the light shot its long bars, illuminating many fresh furrows in the
track leading to the basement door, and showing, under an adjoining
shed, a line of sleighs with heavily blanketed horses.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it
gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was
rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less
tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet
and the metallic dome overhead. "It's like being in an exhausted
receiver," he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a
year's course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled
in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the
images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected
moments, through the totally different associations of thought in
which he had since been living. His father's death, and the
misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan's
studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much
practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge
cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings
glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by
his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the
darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing