The Aristocratic Miss Brewster by Joseph C. Lincoln

All day it had rained and all day the wind had blown savagely from the northeast. The last yellow, desperately clinging leaf had been whipped from the silver-leaf poplar by the front gate and the two tall elms in the yard were naked skeletons of limbs and twigs, which rasped and scraped against each other as the gusts twisted them. All day the gutters had roared and the windowpanes streamed. Now, at five o'clock of this afternoon in November, 1904, the rain had ceased, but the wind blew almost as hard as ever.

Mary Brewster stood by the west window of the sitting room looking out. It was a sodden, dreary scene upon which she looked. The old house, square, white, green-shuttered and red-chimneyed, stood at the top of a little hill. From its paneled and fan-lighted front door the red brick walk, bordered by the inevitable box hedges, sloped down to the just as inevitable white fence and gate which separated the Brewster property from the main road of Wapatomac. Along that road the houses were scattered, shapeless, gloomy blotches against the slaty sky of that dark afternoon, with but the infrequent gleam of a kitchen lamp as evidence that they were inhabited. Not a soul was in sight on the puddle-sprinkled road or sidewalks. The only sounds were the snarling of the wind, the drip from the eaves, or the occasional rattle of a falling branch. A cold, wet, miserable, lonely, depressing outlook. Mary Brewster pulled down the window shade and turned her back upon it. Her spirits needed no external weight to force them lower. They were depressed sufficiently as it was.