Designs on Life by Elizabeth Ferrars

the other. Her eyes and her cheeks were bright and her voice was high and gay. She too seemed to be almost bursting with excitement and desire at the thought of the snow. Yet on coming into the room, she said at once, “How cold and miserable it looks! Whyever haven’t you drawn the curtains?”
    “She wouldn’t have it,” Mrs. Nettle said, rising from the chair by the fire and beginning to roll up her mending. “She was afraid she’d miss the snow. It hasn’t started yet, has it, Mrs. Ellis?”
    The child was looking with some anxiety at the bright-cheeked young woman who was tugging the warm velvet curtains across the window.
    “Mummy,” she said “it has started, hasn’t it, Mummy? On your coat! That’s snow, isn’t it? It is, isn’t it?” Her voice was rising with each word.
    “Yes, darling, it’s just started.” Her mother looked down at the small sequins of brightness that spangled the front of her coat. “It’s nothing yet, but I shouldn’t wonder if it’s deep by tomorrow morning.”
    “How deep?”
    “Oh, ever so deep.”
    “Enough to make a snowman?”
    Mrs. Nettle had put her darning away in a cretonne bag. “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Ellis,” she said, “I think I’ll be getting straight home. I’d sooner get home before the road gets slippery. I washed up the lunch things and I put all the tea things on the trolley. You’ve only to boil the kettle.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Nettle, thank you so much.” The young woman beat at her coat with her hands, so that the little drops of melting snow fell on the carpet. “It was so good of you to stay on. I hope Meg hasn’t been too much trouble.”
    “No, I wasn’t any trouble at all,” the child said.
    The women smiled at one another and Mrs. Ellis went on, “It’s so nice to get out sometimes on one’s own. I’m really grateful.”
    “Well, I’ll be glad to do it any time, if I can manage it,” Mrs. Nettle said. “Did you see a nice picture?”
    “Picture?” the young woman said vaguely. She was watching the child, who had gone to the window and, dragging aside one curtain, was pressing her face to the glass.
    “Mummy,” Meg cried, “it isn’t snowing! I can’t see anything. I don’t believe it’s snowing, Mummy.”
    “That’s because of the wind blowing so hard,” her mother said. “You’d see it on the other side of the house.” She opened her bag to pay Mrs. Nettle what she owed her for sitting-in with the child. “Yes, it was a good film,” she added, “really quite good. I enjoyed it.”
    “Mummy, I can see Mr. Ferguson’s house from here,” Meg said, rubbing at the mist that her own breath formed on the glass. “He’s just turned out all his lights. D’you think he’s going for a walk in the snow? D’you think perhaps he’s coming over to see us?”
    “I’m quite sure he isn’t,” her mother answered.
    Something in her tone, some emphasis or roughness, made Mrs. Nettle lift her eyebrows for an instant. But she lowered them quickly, as if she did not really want to see what she might if she looked longer. Taking the three half-crowns with a murmur of thanks, she said, “Well, I’ll see you in the morning, unless I can’t get here. I don’t care for slippery roads. Good night, Mrs. Ellis.” Going to the door, she called to the child, “Good night, love.”
    But Meg was too absorbed in what she could see through the window, if she let the curtain fall behind her head, shutting out the light of the room, to answer.
    In the distance, across the common, where she had picked the first blackberries that she had ever eaten, during the first weeks that she had spent in England, she could see the lights in Mrs. Nettle’s son-in-law’s cottage. Beside it, less brightly lit, was the cottage lived in by the Irish family, and next door to that, the cottage of Mr. Brookes, who sometimes came to help with the garden. But over to the right, where Mr. Ferguson’s house stood, and where a few minutes