On a winter evening, the speaker goes for a walk alone. He has no one to talk to, but the sight of cottages with snow up to their windows gives him a kind of company. Through lace curtains he catches glimpses of young people and hears a violin, and for a while he feels as if he shares in that warmth without entering it.
But once he walks beyond the last cottage and turns back, every window has gone dark. The imagined sociability disappears, and his own footsteps over the snow feel loud and almost intrusive in the sleeping village. The mood is quiet and wistful, with a trace of embarrassment: the speaker has been outside other people’s lives all along, comforted briefly by their light, then left alone with the creak of his own feet at ten o’clock.