Probably another false alarm, thought Miss Whitford, and she brusquely turned off the radio. Nevertheless, it was a depressing sort of day, the air both moist and warm. She rose from the Morris chair in her library, and went over to look at the aneroid barometer on the wall by the fireplace. It read 29.80. Not low enough, in September, to account for the depression in the air, nor was the air enough, surely, to explain the depression she felt, the sense of thickness in the lungs as though the act of breathing was a difficulty. She could have understood that if the wind had blown from the southwest, one of those smoky storms that make one feel as though one were going to come down with jaundice. I trust it’s not my heart, she said to herself. Then she dismissed that as pure nonsense. There was nothing in the world the matter with her. Though sixty is no longer young.

Miss Whitford walked to the door and went into the living room. There has never been an autumn, she thought, when I have had so few flowers in the house. What with the awful drought this summer and no proper servants to help her, the flowers were scarce and poor and their arrangement a chore. The calendulas and cosmos were pretty, but the marigolds were few and wilted quickly. The chrysanthemums weren’t out yet, and such dahlias as flowered were clumsy and overlarge for her vases. The roses were not in bloom. If we get another hurricane, she thought, there’ll be no flowers at all. None at all. It was a very unpleasant thought. She walked to one of the south windows and looked out at the afternoon.

The lawn fell gently from the house to the herbaceous border to the south. The border itself was protected by a low hedge of yew, still ragged and with gaps in it. It had not yet grown together, having been planted since the hurricane of 1938. Beyond the yew hedge, the land fell sharply to the rocks of Julian Point. The tide was high and ebbing, and the two great rocks, The Rhino and The Hippo, showed offshore only their weed-brown tops in the salt water of the ocean. The wind, Miss Whitford noted, was northerly. Northeast, about, and fresh. The waves it created made a white and decorative pattern of broken surf around the rocks. The sky was overcast, the light gray but fairly bright. In the distance she could see the black remnant of Tabbert Lighthouse swept by the passing waves.

The trouble was, she must make up her mind—now. She turned from the window and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Three-forty. Either she was going to make preparations for the hurricane—it was to come again, again, her inner thoughts said—or she was not. There’d be only a little more daylight and no one to help her but Abel Cotton, with the somewhat problematical assistance of Mrs. Bartel. She and Abel would probably have it all to do. There was so much to do, if you once started. So much easier to disbelieve, to say that the really ominous warning on the radio was calamity-howling, that there couldn’t be another hurricane, now, in 1944. So much to do. So many decisions to make. And one was alone to make them, nobody to ask, nobody with whom to discuss. Even Sierra, Sierra was gone. She threw back her head, a little defiantly, and she said aloud, “And a good thing too.” But there was still the decision to make, and it seemed to her then that it was almost as though she had to decide, she, Edie Whitford, alone, whether or not there was to be a hurricane. Again.