band. . . . Has Addie gone? But you go now . . . you go also . . . to Gerrit's house. . . . And then come back here again. . . . I want to see you . . . all three of you . . . here again. . . . Do you understand? . . . All three of you . . . do you understand?"
"Yes, Mamma."
"Go now . . . go. . . ."
They went; and the children took their leave.
Outside, it was snowing great flakes. The snowflakes had been falling all through the night over the small town out of an infinite land of death, out of infinite sky-plains of infinite death. And, after all the gloom of the dark nights that had been, the nights under the grey skies of storm and rain, it had snowed whiter and whiter out of the dense greyness of sky-plains and skyland, flakes falling upon flakes in a soft white shroud of oblivion that enveloped houses and people. . . .
