The first snow of the winter came on a Tuesday, in the afternoon, without much fuss.

Nora saw it first, from the window over the sink. A few flakes, going sideways, the kind you could count. She said, “Snow,” to the room, and Finn, who was doing something to the stove, said, “It won’t settle,” in the voice of a man who has said it before, and been wrong before, and does not intend to stop.

It settled.

By four o’clock the yard was white. By five the lane had gone, and the gate was a suggestion, and the sky had come down so low and so close that the hill behind the house was only a paler kind of grey. The flakes had stopped going sideways. They came straight down now, thick and slow and steady, as if they had been booked for the whole night and meant to give value.

“Well,” said Finn, at the window. “That’s us, then.”

The house was small, which is a good thing in snow. One room downstairs, with the stove in the middle of it, and the stairs going up in the corner, and the door to the yard with its brass latch. The stove was old and black and had a temper, but Finn understood it, and he had it going now with a low orange light behind the glass and a smell of hot iron and woodsmoke that got into everything and was welcome to.

Nora filled the kettle and put it on the top plate. It began, almost at once, to tick.

Their boots stood by the door with the snow melting off them. Their socks, which had got wet in the yard fetching in the last of the logs, hung over the rail of the stove, two grey and two blue, steaming very faintly and smelling of wool. Finn had put his hand on them twice already to see if they were dry. They were not.

“Cards?” said Nora.

“Cards,” said Finn.

They sat at the table, which was small and square and had one leg shorter than the others, so that it rocked a little whenever anyone leaned on it, and it was Nora’s turn to deal, and she dealt.

It was about then that the draught made itself known.

It came under the door. It was thin and low and cold and it went straight across the flagstones like a ruler, and it found Nora’s ankles, and then it found Finn’s.

“There’s a draught,” said Finn.

“There is.”

“Under the door.”

“Yes.”

He got up and looked at the door, as if the door might explain itself. Then he fetched a cushion from the chair by the stove and put it along the bottom of the door, and the cushion, being a cushion, sat there in a round and unhelpful way and let the draught go under it and round both ends.

“That’s not it,” said Nora.

He tried the doormat. The doormat was too stiff to lie flat and too short to reach across, and when he pushed one end of it into the corner the other end came up, and the draught, which had been waiting, came in over the top.

“That’s worse,” said Nora.

Finn stood back with his hands on his hips and regarded the door with the expression he usually saved for the stove.

Nora got up. She went to the rail by the sink and took down the towel that hung there, the blue one, the big one, and she rolled it up, tightly, from one long side to the other, the way you would roll a map, until it was a long fat sausage of towel. Then she laid it along the bottom of the door and pushed it into place with her foot.

The draught stopped.

It did not fade. It stopped. One moment there was a thin cold line across the floor, and the next there was not, and the room, which had been warm at the top and cold at the bottom, was warm all the way down.

Finn looked at the towel. He looked at Nora.

“I was getting to that,” he said.

“I know you were.”

They sat back down. The kettle had come to the boil while they were busy, and had been ignored, and was now rattling its lid in a pointed way, so Nora got up again and made the tea, and brought it back, and they picked up their cards.

“Whose go?” said Finn.

“Yours.”

“It was not.”

It was. He went. He put down a seven, and Nora put down an eight, and then they both stopped, because outside the window the snow had done something.

It had got heavier. Or the light had changed. The lamp on the sill lit a little of the yard, and in that little the flakes came down so thick and so close that they seemed not to be falling at all but to be hanging, the whole white crowd of them, held in the air, and only when you picked one out and followed it did you see it go. They watched it for a while. It was better than cards.

“It’ll be deep by morning,” said Finn.

“It will.”

“We’ll not get out.”

“No.”

He sounded pleased. She was pleased. There is a particular pleasure in not being able to get out, when the stove is lit and the logs are in and there is nowhere you were meant to be.

The tea went down. The cards lay where they were, a seven and an eight face up on the table and the rest of the game held in two hands that had been put down and forgotten. The table rocked, once, when Finn leaned on it to look out, and was still. He put his hand on the socks. They were nearly dry. He turned them over so the other side could have a go.

Nora put another log in the stove. It took a moment, then caught, and the orange light behind the glass went up and settled, and the stove ticked and shifted and said the small things that stoves say.

Outside, the snow went on.

It was very quiet. Snow is. It had taken the sound out of the lane and off the hill and away from the yard, and it had left them the stove and the kettle and the small sigh of the towel settling against the door. There was no wind. There was nothing to hear but the house being warm.

Finn yawned. He tried to hide it, and could not, and Nora yawned back, because that is how yawns work.

Nobody said anything about the cards. Nobody was going to. Tomorrow one of them would find them on the table and shuffle them back into the box and not remember who had been winning, and it would not matter, because it had not mattered tonight.

The socks were dry. Finn took them off the rail and folded them and put them on the chair. The kettle, back on the plate, ticked as it cooled. The towel lay along the bottom of the door, blue and fat and doing its job, and the draught stayed on the other side of it, in the yard, in the dark, with the snow.

They went up.

Behind them the stove kept its low light going, and the room stayed warm all the way down to the floor, and outside, over the lane and the gate and the hill and the small stone house, the snow came down, and came down, and came down.