At about two that afternoon most of the people left, and there was a brief lull in the schedule before supper. “Shall we take Sophia for a walk?” asked Lenox.
“Isn’t it too cold?”
“It’s brightened up now, and we can bundle her up.”
To their surprise the child’s old caretaker, now Mrs. Ponsonby, overheard them and asked if she might come, too. “Everyone imagines me much busier than I am,” she said. “Mostly it has been waiting.” Then Freddie decided that he might as well come, too — there were some very fine waxberries if they walked the loop around the pond.
So they bundled the young girl, with her alert eyes, her pink cheeks, in a mountain of warm clothes, set her in her pram — sturdy enough to conquer the snow, certainly — and set out to walk the path along the pond, happily chattering about the morning, in anticipation of the goose that was being cooked for the evening.
In the library Edmund and Teddy were both reading, the father a parliamentary report, the son a manual on the azimuth compass.
When he noticed his brother outside, Edmund stood up and walked to the cold glass window, close enough that he could press his nose against it. How happy they looked!
As Edmund watched, half a smile on his face, Freddie stopped his guests’ procession under a broad-branched evergreen and began to lecture them; when he tapped the trunk knowledgably with his cane, however, a great bank of snow shifted in the tree and crashed over them.
Edmund laughed out loud. “Teddy, go and fetch a cloak to the front door for your aunt and your cousin, if you would. I think they’ll have need of it.” Indeed, the whole party had by now already begun to turn back, smiling, laughing, and, in Jane’s case, rather exasperated: making together for the warmth of home.