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squawking of crows and a bright shaft of sunlight falling obliquely across my bed. Alice was not beside me, but I could hear the sound of her spade turning frozen earth below in the garden. I got up and washed, then went down to the kitchen. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and the earth was covered with a thin sheet of snow. The hills in the distance, sprinkled with a light., white powder, had the appearance of slumbering oxen.
    I found the table set and there was the smell of buns baking in the oven and hot cocoa on the stove.
    Alice came in, her cheeks glowing, her arms full of freshly picked dahlias. She said good morning to me and started to arrange the huge, brightly colored flowers in a vase.
    I watched her puttering for a while, waiting for her to speak.
    “What is it, Alice?” I said, finally. “What’s bothering you?”
    “Nothing, dear,” she said blankly and went on with her floral arrangements. “Only—”
    “Yes?”
    “I wish we’d acted better.”
    “We’re not gods, Alice. We’re only human. We did what was best.”
    “It was freezing last night, and he had no warm clothing.”
    “I think we’ve done quite enough for the boy.”
    “It was cruel to send him out in the cold like that.”
    “We did what was best,” I said again, this time a little abrasively.
    “I know. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
    “Nor me,” I snapped, at the end of my patience. “But I’m sure that what we did was for the best. Now, that’s the end of it. He’s gone. Let’s drop it.”
    She turned from her dahlias and stared fully at me. I’d never seen such an expression on her face.
    Afterward she took her buns from the oven and served them fresh with piping hot cocoa. We sat at the table eating, and then I said, making idle talk, “It’s a beautiful morning.”
    “Go look at the garden door,” she said.
    At first I didn’t understand, and looked at her blankly.
    “Go,” she said again.
    I went down into the garden and crossed quickly to the small cellar door. Directly in front of it, and leading from it straight across the lawn to the woods in the back was the trail of a man’s shoe prints outlined very clearly in the light fall of snow.
    The cellar door had been scratched and splintered in several places as if a large animal had clawed at it. And above the lintel smeared in large red letters was the word GOD, which Richard Atlee had written in the blood he had drawn from lacerating his hands on the cellar door.

Chapter Three
    Richard Atlee stopped coming after that night. Then strangely enough the weather improved. It went the other way from what everyone expected. In the weeks that followed, Indian summer fell over the land. The sun was warm and the ground that had started to freeze only a few weeks earlier became soft and muddy.
    Alice and I fell into our old easy, uneventful routine. Once again she worked in the garden. She pulled up her dahlia tubers and stored them in peat moss for the winter. Together, we seeded all the bare parts of the lawn and then drew the spreader over all the ground fertilizing it for the spring that was to come.
    Alice baked pies and buns on the weekends, and on Sundays we would drive over to the small church where we worshipped. After the services Alice would always present a pie or a freshly baked cake to the pastor.
    It was a simple church—a white-steepled affair, austere in every way, with a glass clerestory in the tower, where in warmer weather birds swarmed by the thousands.
    One Sunday morning, with sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows we listened to the pastor read the words of Paul from First Corinthians.
Charity suffereth long and is kind;
    Charity vaunteth not itself.
    Charity never faileth—
    When I was a child I spoke as a child—
    And so he went on, midway between chant and talk, and slightly nasal, until he came to the end. “But then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, and