The friends turn in, and the door swings to.
“This time last year he was here with you.
There were three of us then, but one is dead.’
– ‘Under the stars
Where a fox might pass,
Hushed the snow,’ the other man said.
“Three together; and yet I doubt
If he would have chosen to venture out.
The blinding snows would have kept him in.’
– ‘So hard a frost
And our good friend lost.’
The voices drop. You could hear a pin.
‘Does it not seem as then, this place,
Now that our footsteps leave no trace
And the road is lost in the snow’s white gloom,
When we came to find,
Frost-gripped, snow-blind,
A man with a glass in this very room
Who spoke of a moment all clocks miss?
– Silver the lintels were, like this,
That night, the first of so many a week,
When we sat and gazed
Where the log-fire blazed.
If I shut my eyes, I would hear him speak.’
‘He leaned on his words as one leans on a spade.
That first impression will never fade.
My fixed attention to what he said
As he knocked on the sash
His burnt-out ash
Is here this night, though the man is dead.
– ‘Crusted the glass, and the roads are white.
How near, though lost, he has come to-night.
He would cross the silver fox’s track
– You can see it clear
From the window here –
And enter, leaving the night more black.’
“The pendulum swings, and the nightfrost, too,
Swings back our dead to the room with you.
Ohark how the snow like a white hand knocks
On the window-pane,
And is gone again!
– ‘So bright, so hushed, like the brush of a fox.
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