A writer stays in his old house on Cape Cod in September, tidying it up and enjoying the last of the warm weather. He wishes it was still July, but it seems as though the summer passed in the blink of an eye. After watching the sun rise and doing some reading, the writer walks out to a dock where he sees a rowboat coming towards him. Jolly, who is also a writer, sits while his wife rows. The writer helps them pull in their boat. They invite him to after-dinner tea. That evening, the writer and Jolly's wife sit together and have a conversation. Jolly has already gone to bed for the night. The wife tells the writer about a friend she had seen in town earlier. The man used to be an old acquaintance of Jolly's that the wife got to know better over time. The writer takes interest in this, wondering about how friends are made, and wondering what isolation does to somebody. The conversation shifts, and the writer asks the woman how long they'll be gone, since they head south during the winters. The writer says that they stay away too long and makes her promise that they'll come back as soon as they can. He says he might have gone back to Boston by then, but they could visit him there. When he gets up to leave, the door sticks, so Jolly's wife has to open it for him. As she does, the writer puts his hand on her back so she doesn't fall, but he worries that this physical contact would make things awkward between them, so he hurries away. In the winter, the writer comes out of the snow into his old house. He cooks and eats a meal alone, which he thinks is one of the most lonely things a person can do. That night he falls asleep by the stove. In the morning, he wakes up and imagines that the sounds of the weather are a ghost. He walks around his house, searching to see if it needs any repairs. He remembers a local man who hanged himself in the hills nearby after giving up his wife. It would probably be his ghost that he was hearing, he suspects, if he believed in ghosts. Outside, he finds a few missing shingles and some slats that had fallen out of a blind. He also notes that the house could use fresh paint. He looks past the house to the surrounding environment, which looks different in the snow, but beautiful nonetheless.