The Luck of the Vails

The short winter's day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, falling in throbs of clear dusk over an ice-bound land. The sun, brilliant but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all the hours of its shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable.