Christmastide and a good heart’s breath against a cold pane are enough to bring lost faces back in evergreen eternity. - Davis Grubb

It was as if, within that still winter night's vastness a strange soft-feathered bird of passage had come to beat its hopeless wings against the windows of her heart.

Old houses move in their sleep like the dreaming, remembering limbs of very old people. Boards whisper, steps cry out softly to the whispering remembrance of footfalls long gone to earth. Mantelpieces strain gently in the darkness beneath the ghosts of old Christmas stockings. Joists and beams and rafters hunch lightly like the brittle ribs of old women in their sleep: the heart recalling, the worn carpet slippers whispering down the halls again.

Hate, my gentle lady, said Captain Anschutz, is only Love that has lost its way home in the dark.