Roses for Christmas. Бетти Нилс

said that if I got lost on the mountains I wouldn’t be at all frightened if I knew you were searching for me.’

      Eleanor gave her mother a daughterly hug. ‘Let’s get on with the dinner, then at least Henry can start out on a full stomach. Are they to be back for tea? It gets dark early…’

      ‘Five o’clock at the latest, Mr MacDow said—they’ll have torches with them…I thought we’d have treacle scones and I baked a cake yesterday—he’ll be hungry.’

      Henry, well fed, suitably clothed, and admonished by his three elder relations to mind what the teacher said and not to go off by himself, was seen off just after one o’clock. The afternoon was fine, with the sky still blue and the cold sunshine lighting up the mountains he was so eager to climb. Not that there was anything hazardous about the expedition; they would follow the road, a narrow one full of hairpin bends, until they reached the cairn in the dip between the mountains encircling it, and then, if there was time, they would explore the caves.

      ‘I shall probably find something very exciting,’ said Henry importantly as he set off on his short walk back to the village school where they were to foregather.

      Eleanor stood at the door and watched them set out, waving cheerfully to Mr MacDow, striding behind the boys like a competent shepherd with a flock of sheep. She said out loud: ‘I’d better make some chocolate buns as well,’ and sniffed the air as she turned to go indoors again; it had become a good deal colder.

      She didn’t notice at first that it was becoming dark far too early; her mother was having a nap in the sitting room, her father would be writing his sermon in his study and she had been fully occupied in the kitchen, but now she went to the window and looked out. The blue sky had become grey, and looking towards the sea she saw that it had become a menacing grey, lighted by a pale yellowish veil hanging above it. ‘Snow,’ she said, and her voice sounded urgent in the quiet kitchen and even as she spoke the window rattled with violence of a sudden gust of wind. It was coming fast too; the sea, grey and turbulent, was already partly blotted out. She hurried out of the kitchen and into the sitting room and found her mother still sleeping, and when she went into the study it was to find her father dozing too. She took another look out of the window and saw the first slow snowflakes falling; a blizzard was on the way, coming at them without warning. She prayed that Mr MacDow had seen it too and was already on the way down the mountain with the boys. She remembered then that if they had already reached the cairn, there would be no view of the sea from it, the mountains around them would cut off everything but the sky above them. She went back to her father and roused him gently. ‘There’s a blizzard on the way,’ she told him urgently. ‘What ought we to do? The boys…’