But these two centers of sociability are both at the depot road corner, and when they are passed the only sources of illumination are the scattered gleams from the back windows of dwellings.

As most of us retire by half-past eight, the glow along the main road is not dazzling, to say the very least.
Miss Dawes was not afraid of the dark.

She had been her own escort for a good many years.

She walked briskly on, heard the laughter and loud voices in the barber shop die away behind her, passed the schoolhouse pond, now bleak and chill with the raw November wind blowing across it, and began to climb the slope of Whittaker's Hill.

And here the wind, rushing in unimpeded over the flooded salt meadows from the tumbled bay outside, wound her skirts about her and made climbing difficult and breath-taking.
She was, perhaps, half way up the long slope, when she heard, in the intervals between the gusts, footsteps behind her.